The reality is that EVs are still for many people an expensive novelty. Almost everyone I know drives a cheap petrol car. An EV is going to cost you £300 plus per month in leasing/depreciation costs. A decent second hand petrol car is closer to £100 per month. Old petrol cars can be kept going for 10-20 years. EV's are not going to last as long as the battery will go and will be uneconomic to replace....
Simply not true for some battery chemistries. The iron cathode LFP batteries, which are likely to be used in cheaper models (already used in some of Tesla's Chinese cars), have slightly lower performance, but are much more stable, and should last up to a million km.
By the time EVs are fully cost competitive with ICEs, battery life (as well as costs costs) ought to be much less of a concern.
Absolutely but as of today and over the next few years (how many? 3-5?) ain't no one hanging around for a 2nd hand Tesla at £30k +/-.
I can see a huge amount of inertia in changing to electric and that's aside from the "charging point in every lamp post" fallacy.
Cost and convenience have to change dramatically so Allegra is quite right in what she says. Or would people prefer her to go out and spaff £50k on an electric car and say "come on you lot what's keeping you?"
A friend of mine switched to Zoe (EV) a year or two back from a ICE BMW 1 series - he chooses to buy his own car and get mileage allowance from employer. For the Zoe, the mileage allowance covers electricity and monthly lease costs with extra left over - having switched to an EV he's now effectively getting paid to have it and drive it. For the BMW he still had to contibute some of his own money to run it. (I accept that a BMW 1 series and Zoe are not comparable cars - he could have run an equivalent small petrol car much cheaper than the BMW, but he doesn't think there was an option there that would actually leave him in profit as with the Zoe.)
The reality is that EVs are still for many people an expensive novelty. Almost everyone I know drives a cheap petrol car. An EV is going to cost you £300 plus per month in leasing/depreciation costs. A decent second hand petrol car is closer to £100 per month. Old petrol cars can be kept going for 10-20 years. EV's are not going to last as long as the battery will go and will be uneconomic to replace....
Simply not true for some battery chemistries. The iron cathode LFP batteries, which are likely to be used in cheaper models (already used in some of Tesla's Chinese cars), have slightly lower performance, but are much more stable, and should last up to a million km.
By the time EVs are fully cost competitive with ICEs, battery life (as well as costs costs) ought to be much less of a concern.
Absolutely but as of today and over the next few years (how many? 3-5?) ain't no one hanging around for a 2nd hand Tesla at £30k +/-.
I can see a huge amount of inertia in changing to electric and that's aside from the "charging point in every lamp post" fallacy.
Cost and convenience have to change dramatically so Allegra is quite right in what she says. Or would people prefer her to go out and spaff £50k on an electric car and say "come on you lot what's keeping you?"
I'm taken aback by the number of PBers who are prepared to spend £40k+ on a car.
Most I've ever spent is £23k and I agonised over that. That car will last me at least 10 years.
What are the servicing costs involved with electric cars? What about when the batteries need replacing?
Yep absolutely. £23k out of your bank account is a huge amount and hence people do it on the never never which is of course a ticking time bomb for the govt, interest rate-wise.
I was told by some genius on here last month that interest rates are * never* going up again, because… blah blah blah…
Total nonsense of course.
My advice is to avoid getting yourself into (even more) debt, and get out of bloody equities. Cos pretty soon now: Thar She Blows!
The thing is I've thought the same since last March and have repeatedly got this wrong. With talk of a boom coming out of the pandemic the appetite for equities may yet endure. There is a lot of cash sloshing about looking for a home.
My strongest performing £100 throwaway investment/bet over the last year is still Dogecoin.
The charging infrastructure is so far away at the moment, the majority of people do not have a driveway. Look at the queues at petrol stations and that takes a couple of minutes to fill up. We will need hundreds of thousands of charging stations over the next few years. Is that going to happen?
Also will there be enough electricity. At the moment there are few full electric cars, imagine the spike in demand with million of electric cars on charge all the time.
You make some very good arguments both regarding infrastructure and demand, but you ruin a good argument by posting a figure out of thin air re 'hundreds and thousands of charging stations' and not reading the post the other day which pointed out this was a nonsense figure with some compelling stats (that I was unaware of).
You should be given the benefit of the doubt that you missed that reply, but you do this all the time when you post something that may seem perfectly reasonable and then when it is shown to be wrong respond to the compelling argument by just coming back and repeating the original false item.
What are the servicing costs involved with electric cars?
The Taycan is about the same as any other Porsche at the dealer at about 1,200 quid. You only have to have it done every two years though.
Forgive my ignorance but do electric cars have gears? If not, and if I were to be convinced that gearless cars will be standard soon, then why is my daughter* bothering to learn to drive in a manual?
(*She narrowly failed a practice theory test this week (85% pass mark required!) and one of the questions she got wrong was about a situation involving a milk float. She doesn't know what a milk float is. Why would she FFS - she's 17 and never seen one in her life.)
All electric? No, mad Porsche aside. My eldest learned in an auto as what is the point now of learning a stick shift? Once you have a motor as transmission you do not want to go back to a gearbox.
Yes, I'm sure this is right, but most learner drivers still learn in a manual because they (rightly or wrongly) think that renting a car when abroad is likely to be a manual and if you pass your test in an automatic you are only licensed (and able!) to drive an automatic.
Anti-vaxxers protest BBC coverage of pandemic by storming a building in White City. A building the BBC vacated in 2013 and is now luxury flats. Is there a link between stupidity and anti-vax? Opinions vary but evidence is growing …
Who are these idiots? They protested a block of flats, not realising the BBC haven’t used the building for eight years!
I guess they’re the same idiots who don’t want to get vaccinated against a pandemic virus, so maybe that explains a lot!
This is where we need to be a bit careful. It is too easy to say these antivax protesters are idiots while believing their equivalents in Paris are representative of the entire French nation.
The advantage of protesting at White City is that Westfield shopping centre is just across the road. So you can combine protesting and nipping across to Nike to get some new trainers for the kids...
We now run an Ioniq EV and an Outlander PHEV. Full EV for all the shorter trips, hybrid for longer runs where long charge stops would make the long trip unviable or where the charging infrastructure is missing. Up here a vehicle with ground clearance is a Good Idea and I use both that feature and the huge internal load space regularly. If someone wants to build a full-size EV SUV and install a glut of hyper chargers, I'm interested.
But PHEVs will be banned by 2030, won't they? So what will you do then?
I believe its full fat petrol and diseasal that gets the ban, not hybrids. But by 2030 the charger network will be fit for purpose and battery chemistry will have taken further leap forwards as to make a PHEV an antique.
My comment was based on now. Let me give you my last 2 car purchases as examples.
I started a new job in 2020 - commuting from Teesside to Sheffield several times a week plus business trips up and down the country. The only EV that could remotely do the job was a Tesla, the S was too expensive and the 3 a few months away from launching. My wife already had a hyprid (non-PHEV) which whilst efficient on the motorway was a bit meh.
So I went back to looking at nice cars. BMW have gone mad, Mercedes didn't move me, new Lexus was beautiful but with a Sega Master System infotainment system. So I bought a diesel - having sworn that diseasal was dead I would never touch one again. Volvo S90, bought pre-reg'd at a massive discount in true luxobarge spec.
Then early this year I moved up to Buchan. Big business trips still likely but like everything post-Covid few and far between. Volvo too long and too over-wheeled for these roads, house project meant needed hauling space, so sold it for a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. Which is nice enough to sit in for the long trips, is happy being bounced down tracks, has got vast load space, and runs largely on electric up here.
My next car? TBH I can see the Outlander being run into the ground. Mechanically simple, Japanese build quality and reliability, its already a workhorse when needed and long distance family bus when needed and nice exec wafting when needed.
I appreciate you're talking about now - and I'm sure the two-car solution works very well - but the big debate is about the future. I found this from last November:
To aid the transition, drivers will still be able to purchase new hybrid cars until 2035, but only those that can 'drive a significant distance without emitting carbon'.
When the government outlined its 'Road to Zero' strategy in 2018, including a ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2040, it said only hybrid cars 'capable of covering 50 miles or more' using electric power alone would remain on sale beyond the deadline.
At the time, 98 per cent of all hybrid cars on sale failed to meet that criteria.
So it looks like we don't know for sure what the future is, but I'd have thought vehicle manufacturers would be looking to phase out hybrids too. Why carry on building ICEs when they are all banned from 2035?
Does Allegra Stratton work for the Tory Party or for the government? How does it work? Could Boris for example employ his wife's best friend or the Chancellor's best man's to any sinecure he chooses?
Anti-vaxxers protest BBC coverage of pandemic by storming a building in White City. A building the BBC vacated in 2013 and is now luxury flats. Is there a link between stupidity and anti-vax? Opinions vary but evidence is growing …
Who are these idiots? They protested a block of flats, not realising the BBC haven’t used the building for eight years!
I guess they’re the same idiots who don’t want to get vaccinated against a pandemic virus, so maybe that explains a lot!
This is where we need to be a bit careful. It is too easy to say these antivax protesters are idiots while believing their equivalents in Paris are representative of the entire French nation.
The advantage of protesting at White City is that Westfield shopping centre is just across the road. So you can combine protesting and nipping across to Nike to get some new trainers for the kids...
Lol some massive inflation compared to recent cohorts
44% are A* or A (25.2% in 2019). 37.9% of students got three As or better (more than doubled from the 17.9% in 2019).
Totally as a result of the cowardly actions by The government in not resisting pressure to just accepting teacher assessment.The government have destroyed credibilty in the results and therefore the exams
One issue is following Gove and Spielman’s chaotic reforms we had an untried exam system hugely reliant on a few exams at the end.
It was, for example, not statistically possible last year to use a three year average for exams as most exams had only been in operation for one or two years, and there had been major problems with marking them. This didn’t stop both the Scottish and English governments trying but it stopped it from being reliable or in any way useful.
The new system has in itself a significant distorting effect because students tend to randomly underperform in exams. Maybe they’re ill, or tired if they fall late in the series, or the air on doesn’t work and they struggle to concentrate. So every year you will have about 20% in an exam only system who will underperform. As confirmed by looking at predicted grades for UCAS as against actual grades.
You also have always had people who underperform by very fine margins. Somebody can get BBB and yet be one mark in each subject off AAA. What will they have been predicted? Well, AAA. Because that’s what they would be able to get. And it may even have been marking error that led to some of those (I once had a candidate who got B instead of A because a marker muddled up Henry VI and Henry VII, but AQA didn’t budge even when the error was photographed and sent to them).
And this year, of course, that has been eliminated. So inevitably the grades are much higher because they’re based on sustained performance not a wet Tuesday morning when you’re feeling sick and have been up half the night.
The other thing to say is, one problem is definitely going to be deciding how far they compare. It will depend on the number and type of assessments the school did, and how they were written. This is compounded by the fact the exam boards have sent out almost no materials to help, including no guidance despite their claims, and there are of course only a couple of past papers to draw on.
This is why it is not at all a smart idea to have everything riding on two exams per subject at the end of a two year course. Certainly not in subjects where marking can be subjective such as History or English. Unfortunately, Cummings wasn’t intelligent enough to understand this. (I haven’t forgotten @Fysics_Teacher disagrees with me given the somewhat different nature of physics.)
Spielman should also probably be fired and banned from further work in the public sector for leaving us in this mess over the strenuous objections of experts.
And certainly Williamson should be fired for not making contingency plans from last September onwards. But whose fault was that? Oh yes, the order came from Downing Street.
Disclaimer - I didn’t have to set any grades for A-level this year as I wasn’t teaching year 13.
We don't even have the vaccine programme anymore. Is there anything the UK got right during COVID
The Gov't has made it very clear the risk between being vaccinated and getting Covid is very close if you're 16-18 years old so why bother to take time out your day to get vaccinated.
I actually think the Government has a lot of blame to take for the low youth take-up. They spent months telling people that once the elderly were done, the young were free to go about their lives.
They did a U-turn at the last minute but the damage was done.
The young are free to go about their lives.
Whether they're vaccinated or not is going to have minimal effect on hospitalisations and deaths.
Its the vaccination rates of the 40+ which matter - if those aren't high enough then its going to make sod all difference how many teenagers are vaccinated.
Allegra has a very sensible point for a "long journeys on occasional weekends, and nothing in the week" pattern, but politics does not like sensible points. Love the Mirror describing a diesel golf as a "gas guzzler".
Very interesting programme by Guy Martin trying out electric cars last night on C4. He managed to eject himself out of the back of an electric mountain-bike. And did a Newcastle -> John O Groats and back electric journey in just over 24 hours.
Verdict: they go like stink; buy one now if your journeys are within 50 miles of home; if you drive a 200+ journey a couple of time a week wait 2 years.
I note that pure electric is now 11% of the new market.
IMO it will all be in place sufficiently by 2024-2025.
The new generation of top-of-the-range EVs do indeed go like stink.
The latest 2022 Tesla S Plaid can run the quarter mile in 9.2 seconds at 152mph. It costs £120k.
The only other cars close to that, are a £450k Ferrari SF90 or a £350k McLaren 765LT, both of which run around 9.4s.
What are the servicing costs involved with electric cars?
The Taycan is about the same as any other Porsche at the dealer at about 1,200 quid. You only have to have it done every two years though.
Forgive my ignorance but do electric cars have gears? If not, and if I were to be convinced that gearless cars will be standard soon, then why is my daughter* bothering to learn to drive in a manual?
(*She narrowly failed a practice theory test this week (85% pass mark required!) and one of the questions she got wrong was about a situation involving a milk float. She doesn't know what a milk float is. Why would she FFS - she's 17 and never seen one in her life.)
All electric? No, mad Porsche aside. My eldest learned in an auto as what is the point now of learning a stick shift? Once you have a motor as transmission you do not want to go back to a gearbox.
Yes, I'm sure this is right, but most learner drivers still learn in a manual because they (rightly or wrongly) think that renting a car when abroad is likely to be a manual and if you pass your test in an automatic you are only licensed (and able!) to drive an automatic.
Everyone should learn in a manual, you're just restricting yourself if you don't.
The reality is that EVs are still for many people an expensive novelty. Almost everyone I know drives a cheap petrol car. An EV is going to cost you £300 plus per month in leasing/depreciation costs. A decent second hand petrol car is closer to £100 per month. Old petrol cars can be kept going for 10-20 years. EV's are not going to last as long as the battery will go and will be uneconomic to replace....
Simply not true for some battery chemistries. The iron cathode LFP batteries, which are likely to be used in cheaper models (already used in some of Tesla's Chinese cars), have slightly lower performance, but are much more stable, and should last up to a million km.
By the time EVs are fully cost competitive with ICEs, battery life (as well as costs costs) ought to be much less of a concern.
Absolutely but as of today and over the next few years (how many? 3-5?) ain't no one hanging around for a 2nd hand Tesla at £30k +/-.
I can see a huge amount of inertia in changing to electric and that's aside from the "charging point in every lamp post" fallacy.
Cost and convenience have to change dramatically so Allegra is quite right in what she says. Or would people prefer her to go out and spaff £50k on an electric car and say "come on you lot what's keeping you?"
Thing is, she's supposed to be a spokesperson for the government, not a tribune of the people. It's their, and her business to explain how they propose to get from where we are now to where you want to be.
I didn't see her comments. Did she not do that? She said, reasonably, that she preferred a diesel car today. Did she say for now and evermore? I haven't looked.
Plus can people please lose the "lampost charging" fantasy.
Lamposts are on streets which either have yellow lines or cars parked beside them. They are not dedicated charging stations, which is what is needed. There will need to be such dedicated bays up and down the country. Every or close to every current pay & display space will have to have access to a charger.
At present I reckon around 0.01% of them are such.
This is a huge infrastructure project that I don't see the government addressing now or perhaps for the next decade.
Absolutely! The average person will not buy an EV is they have nowhere to charge it.
This reminds me of the get rid of boilers nonsense and the replace them with an Air/Ground Sourced Heat Pump. This will simply not happen as the vast majority of people do not have a Plant Room in their house to put all the required equipment in, (and ASHP will not warm a normal house very effectively)
Leaving aside whether some of these things are actually practically possible as opposed to just expensive, I do wonder whether some of these emerging Govt policies are being produced by scientists and others on a “money is no object” basis. With Govt ministers not really understanding the technology and implications before apparently adopting as policy.
I think ministers not really understanding the technology and implications is a given. Very few have any science or engineering knowledge whatsoever. Also true for many civil servants with the exception of those working in their field of speciality.
The charging infrastructure is so far away at the moment, the majority of people do not have a driveway. Look at the queues at petrol stations and that takes a couple of minutes to fill up. We will need hundreds of thousands of charging stations over the next few years. Is that going to happen?
Also will there be enough electricity. At the moment there are few full electric cars, imagine the spike in demand with million of electric cars on charge all the time.
You make some very good arguments both regarding infrastructure and demand, but you ruin a good argument by posting a figure out of thin air re 'hundreds and thousands of charging stations' and not reading the post the other day which pointed out this was a nonsense figure with some compelling stats (that I was unaware of).
You should be given the benefit of the doubt that you missed that reply, but you do this all the time when you post something that may seem perfectly reasonable and then when it is shown to be wrong respond to the compelling argument by just coming back and repeating the original false item.
Shame because your post was good otherwise.
That driveway stat is a bit of a red herring.
Thankfully the majority (roughly 60:40) of UK dwellings have off street parking. Even more, those who don’t drive cars are over-represented in the dwellings with no car parking. PWC estimated that a chunky 72% of UK drivers have access to off-street parking at home. https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/electric-car-no-driveway
Gets overdone by the London lobby who unduly influence national debate, and like Allegra have good enough public transport.
Anti-vaxxers protest BBC coverage of pandemic by storming a building in White City. A building the BBC vacated in 2013 and is now luxury flats. Is there a link between stupidity and anti-vax? Opinions vary but evidence is growing …
Who are these idiots? They protested a block of flats, not realising the BBC haven’t used the building for eight years!
I guess they’re the same idiots who don’t want to get vaccinated against a pandemic virus, so maybe that explains a lot!
This is where we need to be a bit careful. It is too easy to say these antivax protesters are idiots while believing their equivalents in Paris are representative of the entire French nation.
The advantage of protesting at White City is that Westfield shopping centre is just across the road. So you can combine protesting and nipping across to Nike to get some new trainers for the kids...
Behaving like Extinction Rebellion. Ooops.
No, no
Extinction Rebellion post their CVs into the banks/IT companies when they leave the protest, to apply for jobs.
I and some colleagues had tremendous fun with one graduate applicant a while back. HR had, very nicely, sent us some of his Facebook material, which they check as part of due diligence.
Why don't electric cars in general have manual gears, can somebody explain technically why this is, as I always felt too stupid to ask
They don't need them as they can produce a lot of torque over a very wide range of motor speeds. An ICE car, whether petrol or diesel, only really works effectively over a relatively narrow range of engine speeds so you need a transmission to convert that narrow operating range into a usable range of road speeds.
Allegra has a very sensible point for a "long journeys on occasional weekends, and nothing in the week" pattern, but politics does not like sensible points. Love the Mirror describing a diesel golf as a "gas guzzler".
Very interesting programme by Guy Martin trying out electric cars last night on C4. He managed to eject himself out of the back of an electric mountain-bike. And did a Newcastle -> John O Groats and back electric journey in just over 24 hours.
Verdict: they go like stink; buy one now if your journeys are within 50 miles of home; if you drive a 200+ journey a couple of time a week wait 2 years.
I note that pure electric is now 11% of the new market.
IMO it will all be in place sufficiently by 2024-2025.
The new generation of top-of-the-range EVs do indeed go like stink.
The latest 2022 Tesla S Plaid can run the quarter mile in 9.2 seconds at 152mph. It costs £120k.
The only other cars close to that, are a £450k Ferrari SF90 or a £350k McLaren 765LT, both of which run around 9.4s.
We now run an Ioniq EV and an Outlander PHEV. Full EV for all the shorter trips, hybrid for longer runs where long charge stops would make the long trip unviable or where the charging infrastructure is missing. Up here a vehicle with ground clearance is a Good Idea and I use both that feature and the huge internal load space regularly. If someone wants to build a full-size EV SUV and install a glut of hyper chargers, I'm interested.
But PHEVs will be banned by 2030, won't they? So what will you do then?
I believe its full fat petrol and diseasal that gets the ban, not hybrids. But by 2030 the charger network will be fit for purpose and battery chemistry will have taken further leap forwards as to make a PHEV an antique.
My comment was based on now. Let me give you my last 2 car purchases as examples.
I started a new job in 2020 - commuting from Teesside to Sheffield several times a week plus business trips up and down the country. The only EV that could remotely do the job was a Tesla, the S was too expensive and the 3 a few months away from launching. My wife already had a hyprid (non-PHEV) which whilst efficient on the motorway was a bit meh.
So I went back to looking at nice cars. BMW have gone mad, Mercedes didn't move me, new Lexus was beautiful but with a Sega Master System infotainment system. So I bought a diesel - having sworn that diseasal was dead I would never touch one again. Volvo S90, bought pre-reg'd at a massive discount in true luxobarge spec.
Then early this year I moved up to Buchan. Big business trips still likely but like everything post-Covid few and far between. Volvo too long and too over-wheeled for these roads, house project meant needed hauling space, so sold it for a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. Which is nice enough to sit in for the long trips, is happy being bounced down tracks, has got vast load space, and runs largely on electric up here.
My next car? TBH I can see the Outlander being run into the ground. Mechanically simple, Japanese build quality and reliability, its already a workhorse when needed and long distance family bus when needed and nice exec wafting when needed.
I appreciate you're talking about now - and I'm sure the two-car solution works very well - but the big debate is about the future. I found this from last November:
To aid the transition, drivers will still be able to purchase new hybrid cars until 2035, but only those that can 'drive a significant distance without emitting carbon'.
When the government outlined its 'Road to Zero' strategy in 2018, including a ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2040, it said only hybrid cars 'capable of covering 50 miles or more' using electric power alone would remain on sale beyond the deadline.
At the time, 98 per cent of all hybrid cars on sale failed to meet that criteria.
So it looks like we don't know for sure what the future is, but I'd have thought vehicle manufacturers would be looking to phase out hybrids too. Why carry on building ICEs when they are all banned from 2035?
Why? Because there will remain a market for them and the ICE is a sunk cost. A 50 mile EV range on a hybrid is simple enough. Manufacturers are now increasingly offering PHEV versions of their newest cleanest petrol engines. So having developed this final engine keep churning it out mated to a motor and a battery pack and satisfy all the holdouts / farmers / rural / van drivers.
I credit Tesla for making electric cars desirable to the general population, but in my view most current EVs, in particular Tesla, are massively overengineered.
EVs are the ideal vehicle for the suburbs, where 90% probably of all journeys are made. Electric motors have plenty of torque, which means you get decent performance on a low power motor up to about 50mph, which are the speeds you are going at in the suburbs. Electric motors are also smaller than the ICEs they replace. The way forward, I think is slightly smaller cars, matched to smaller motors and smaller batteries. Batteries are why EVs are more expensive than their ICE equivalents. By making them smaller, you make the car more affordable, lighter, quicker to charge and with more range per KWH, enough for a week's normal use.
Then you try to make the remaining 10% of journeys acceptable, but no more. This takes a change in mindset.
The engineering doesn't work that way. For a number of years, people tried to build electric cars to reduce the cost of the drive train. Primarily the battery size. The result were short ranged cars with such low performance that they were dangerous to drive on motorways.
The acceleration that modern EVs get is the side effect of a drive trained optimised for general usage - the brutal torque curve of electric motors is a natural feature. For decent range, you need regenerative breaking, for example. Which drives battery size up.
The "genius" in Tesla, was looking at the car conversion industry in LA, where for 200K+ you could have your Porsche made electric, and realising that the real costs in that were the one-off work and the battery. The other key insight is that batteries are dropping in price each year and increasing performance. At the same time.
I don't think that changes my point however. Starting with the battery, you work out how to get the most out of it, trading off performance against range. My point is that given most journeys are suburban, where you will get decent performance on a relatively low power set up, you should prioritise range over performance. Or to put it another way, you can get to a certain range with a smaller battery, with the benefits of a more affordable car and quicker charging times.
Why don't electric cars in general have manual gears, can somebody explain technically why this is, as I always felt too stupid to ask
An electric motor works over a much wider range of speed than an internal combustion engine, and all the torque is available from a standstill - so a gearbox is simply not required for electric cars.
It’s actually better to think of it the other way around. An ICE has a relatively narrow band of torque and power, so it needs a gearbox to keep the engine in its operating window across a wide range of speeds.
London public transport is on the whole superb, because it has proper investment and is accessible.
Levelling up now must entail offering the same to elsewhere, not destroying TfL as BoJo wants to do
Exactly. The difference between this and the radial approach in some cities which enable you to get to the centre but nowhere else is important - the key is that in London you can easily get almost anywhere else in London more quickly than by road.
The other thing I'd like to see is a review of planning to require new estates to include a significant retail element. When I lived in Bulwell (Nottingham) my block was surrounded by housing in all directions, but we had a huge Morrisons nearby and an easy walk for nearly everyone. Down here in Godalming the shopping area is almost completely separate from the housing area (with virtually no bus service). Neat city planning with people in X, shops in Y and businesses in Z is the antithesis of how most people want to live.
The charging infrastructure is so far away at the moment, the majority of people do not have a driveway. Look at the queues at petrol stations and that takes a couple of minutes to fill up. We will need hundreds of thousands of charging stations over the next few years. Is that going to happen?
Also will there be enough electricity. At the moment there are few full electric cars, imagine the spike in demand with million of electric cars on charge all the time.
You make some very good arguments both regarding infrastructure and demand, but you ruin a good argument by posting a figure out of thin air re 'hundreds and thousands of charging stations' and not reading the post the other day which pointed out this was a nonsense figure with some compelling stats (that I was unaware of).
You should be given the benefit of the doubt that you missed that reply, but you do this all the time when you post something that may seem perfectly reasonable and then when it is shown to be wrong respond to the compelling argument by just coming back and repeating the original false item.
Shame because your post was good otherwise.
That driveway stat is a bit of a red herring.
Thankfully the majority (roughly 60:40) of UK dwellings have off street parking. Even more, those who don’t drive cars are over-represented in the dwellings with no car parking. PWC estimated that a chunky 72% of UK drivers have access to off-street parking at home. https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/electric-car-no-driveway
Gets overdone by the London lobby who unduly influence national debate
The trouble with that post Matt is your using facts and not something from your imagination. You should know better.
The reality is that EVs are still for many people an expensive novelty. Almost everyone I know drives a cheap petrol car. An EV is going to cost you £300 plus per month in leasing/depreciation costs. A decent second hand petrol car is closer to £100 per month. Old petrol cars can be kept going for 10-20 years. EV's are not going to last as long as the battery will go and will be uneconomic to replace....
Simply not true for some battery chemistries. The iron cathode LFP batteries, which are likely to be used in cheaper models (already used in some of Tesla's Chinese cars), have slightly lower performance, but are much more stable, and should last up to a million km.
By the time EVs are fully cost competitive with ICEs, battery life (as well as costs costs) ought to be much less of a concern.
Absolutely but as of today and over the next few years (how many? 3-5?) ain't no one hanging around for a 2nd hand Tesla at £30k +/-.
I can see a huge amount of inertia in changing to electric and that's aside from the "charging point in every lamp post" fallacy.
Cost and convenience have to change dramatically so Allegra is quite right in what she says. Or would people prefer her to go out and spaff £50k on an electric car and say "come on you lot what's keeping you?"
Thing is, she's supposed to be a spokesperson for the government, not a tribune of the people. It's their, and her business to explain how they propose to get from where we are now to where you want to be.
I didn't see her comments. Did she not do that? She said, reasonably, that she preferred a diesel car today. Did she say for now and evermore? I haven't looked.
Plus can people please lose the "lampost charging" fantasy.
Lamposts are on streets which either have yellow lines or cars parked beside them. They are not dedicated charging stations, which is what is needed. There will need to be such dedicated bays up and down the country. Every or close to every current pay & display space will have to have access to a charger.
At present I reckon around 0.01% of them are such.
This is a huge infrastructure project that I don't see the government addressing now or perhaps for the next decade.
Absolutely! The average person will not buy an EV is they have nowhere to charge it.
This reminds me of the get rid of boilers nonsense and the replace them with an Air/Ground Sourced Heat Pump. This will simply not happen as the vast majority of people do not have a Plant Room in their house to put all the required equipment in, (and ASHP will not warm a normal house very effectively)
Leaving aside whether some of these things are actually practically possible as opposed to just expensive, I do wonder whether some of these emerging Govt policies are being produced by scientists and others on a “money is no object” basis. With Govt ministers not really understanding the technology and implications before apparently adopting as policy.
I think ministers not really understanding the technology and implications is a given. Very few have any science or engineering knowledge whatsoever. Also true for many civil servants with the exception of those working in their field of speciality.
‘Ministers are put in charge precisely because they know nothing.’
The reality is that EVs are still for many people an expensive novelty. Almost everyone I know drives a cheap petrol car. An EV is going to cost you £300 plus per month in leasing/depreciation costs. A decent second hand petrol car is closer to £100 per month. Old petrol cars can be kept going for 10-20 years. EV's are not going to last as long as the battery will go and will be uneconomic to replace....
Simply not true for some battery chemistries. The iron cathode LFP batteries, which are likely to be used in cheaper models (already used in some of Tesla's Chinese cars), have slightly lower performance, but are much more stable, and should last up to a million km.
By the time EVs are fully cost competitive with ICEs, battery life (as well as costs costs) ought to be much less of a concern.
Absolutely but as of today and over the next few years (how many? 3-5?) ain't no one hanging around for a 2nd hand Tesla at £30k +/-.
I can see a huge amount of inertia in changing to electric and that's aside from the "charging point in every lamp post" fallacy.
Cost and convenience have to change dramatically so Allegra is quite right in what she says. Or would people prefer her to go out and spaff £50k on an electric car and say "come on you lot what's keeping you?"
I'm taken aback by the number of PBers who are prepared to spend £40k+ on a car.
Most I've ever spent is £23k and I agonised over that. That car will last me at least 10 years.
What are the servicing costs involved with electric cars? What about when the batteries need replacing?
Yep absolutely. £23k out of your bank account is a huge amount and hence people do it on the never never which is of course a ticking time bomb for the govt, interest rate-wise.
My friend visited the other day in his new car, a £85k Audi electric car. He didn't cough up £85k though, he leases it.
He runs his own ltd company and the reason he went electric is purely down to government incentives. He reckons that the end cost to him when you factor in the tax breaks and the ability to, in effect, get money efficiently out of his ltd company is under £500pm. A £85k car becomes much more feasible when you look at it like that.
For sure. And even for "ordinary" people a monthly lease amount in the hundreds of pounds is much more digestible than the upfront cost of the car they want.
Still £6k a year to run a car though. And his wife has a car too. Ouch.
Versus cash buy a £20k petrol or diesel and keep for 10 years = £2k pa depreciation.
Not as a company car. If it’s an ICE car, and you’re a higher rate taxpayer, you also have to pay several hundred quid a month in tax for the benefit in kind.
Are you sure? I'm sure he said to me that no P11d benefits apply as it is electric.
That’s correct, you only pay the large BIK tax bill for an ICE car. For an EV it’s 1%
London public transport is on the whole superb, because it has proper investment and is accessible.
Levelling up now must entail offering the same to elsewhere, not destroying TfL as BoJo wants to do
Exactly. The difference between this and the radial approach in some cities which enable you to get to the centre but nowhere else is important - the key is that in London you can easily get almost anywhere else in London more quickly than by road.
The other thing I'd like to see is a review of planning to require new estates to include a significant retail element. When I lived in Bulwell (Nottingham) my block was surrounded by housing in all directions, but we had a huge Morrisons nearby and an easy walk for nearly everyone. Down here in Godalming the shopping area is almost completely separate from the housing area (with virtually no bus service). Neat city planning with people in X, shops in Y and businesses in Z is the antithesis of how most people want to live.
Godalming, I know it well. Not far from where I used to live.
The charging infrastructure is so far away at the moment, the majority of people do not have a driveway. Look at the queues at petrol stations and that takes a couple of minutes to fill up. We will need hundreds of thousands of charging stations over the next few years. Is that going to happen?
Also will there be enough electricity. At the moment there are few full electric cars, imagine the spike in demand with million of electric cars on charge all the time.
You make some very good arguments both regarding infrastructure and demand, but you ruin a good argument by posting a figure out of thin air re 'hundreds and thousands of charging stations' and not reading the post the other day which pointed out this was a nonsense figure with some compelling stats (that I was unaware of).
You should be given the benefit of the doubt that you missed that reply, but you do this all the time when you post something that may seem perfectly reasonable and then when it is shown to be wrong respond to the compelling argument by just coming back and repeating the original false item.
Shame because your post was good otherwise.
That driveway stat is a bit of a red herring.
Thankfully the majority (roughly 60:40) of UK dwellings have off street parking. Even more, those who don’t drive cars are over-represented in the dwellings with no car parking. PWC estimated that a chunky 72% of UK drivers have access to off-street parking at home. https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/electric-car-no-driveway
Gets overdone by the London lobby who unduly influence national debate, and like Allegra have good enough public transport.
We had two cars until I retired, when I just handed the NHS back their car. We were told 'we'd never manage' but we did, even when we went to different places, as a result of different hobbies, interests etc. I think in the 18 years I've used a taxi twice. Had a few lifts though, but equally I've given them Shortly after I retired I bought an e-bike, which I used for a few years, but even rural roads and that good for them when there are odd industrial estates about, with heavy lorries visiting. And cycling along the A12, even on the cycle lane, is not for the faint-hearted. Sadly one of the things that has gone wrong as a result of age is my balance and I've not been able to safely ride my bike for a couple of years. Keep getting up my courage to sell it, but then I think ..... maybe in a month or two.
We now run an Ioniq EV and an Outlander PHEV. Full EV for all the shorter trips, hybrid for longer runs where long charge stops would make the long trip unviable or where the charging infrastructure is missing. Up here a vehicle with ground clearance is a Good Idea and I use both that feature and the huge internal load space regularly. If someone wants to build a full-size EV SUV and install a glut of hyper chargers, I'm interested.
But PHEVs will be banned by 2030, won't they? So what will you do then?
I believe its full fat petrol and diseasal that gets the ban, not hybrids. But by 2030 the charger network will be fit for purpose and battery chemistry will have taken further leap forwards as to make a PHEV an antique.
My comment was based on now. Let me give you my last 2 car purchases as examples.
I started a new job in 2020 - commuting from Teesside to Sheffield several times a week plus business trips up and down the country. The only EV that could remotely do the job was a Tesla, the S was too expensive and the 3 a few months away from launching. My wife already had a hyprid (non-PHEV) which whilst efficient on the motorway was a bit meh.
So I went back to looking at nice cars. BMW have gone mad, Mercedes didn't move me, new Lexus was beautiful but with a Sega Master System infotainment system. So I bought a diesel - having sworn that diseasal was dead I would never touch one again. Volvo S90, bought pre-reg'd at a massive discount in true luxobarge spec.
Then early this year I moved up to Buchan. Big business trips still likely but like everything post-Covid few and far between. Volvo too long and too over-wheeled for these roads, house project meant needed hauling space, so sold it for a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. Which is nice enough to sit in for the long trips, is happy being bounced down tracks, has got vast load space, and runs largely on electric up here.
My next car? TBH I can see the Outlander being run into the ground. Mechanically simple, Japanese build quality and reliability, its already a workhorse when needed and long distance family bus when needed and nice exec wafting when needed.
I appreciate you're talking about now - and I'm sure the two-car solution works very well - but the big debate is about the future. I found this from last November:
To aid the transition, drivers will still be able to purchase new hybrid cars until 2035, but only those that can 'drive a significant distance without emitting carbon'.
When the government outlined its 'Road to Zero' strategy in 2018, including a ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2040, it said only hybrid cars 'capable of covering 50 miles or more' using electric power alone would remain on sale beyond the deadline.
At the time, 98 per cent of all hybrid cars on sale failed to meet that criteria.
So it looks like we don't know for sure what the future is, but I'd have thought vehicle manufacturers would be looking to phase out hybrids too. Why carry on building ICEs when they are all banned from 2035?
Why? Because there will remain a market for them and the ICE is a sunk cost. A 50 mile EV range on a hybrid is simple enough. Manufacturers are now increasingly offering PHEV versions of their newest cleanest petrol engines. So having developed this final engine keep churning it out mated to a motor and a battery pack and satisfy all the holdouts / farmers / rural / van drivers.
Okay, but five years isn't very long, is it? So it's pretty much the same situation as regular ICEs.
The charging infrastructure is so far away at the moment, the majority of people do not have a driveway. Look at the queues at petrol stations and that takes a couple of minutes to fill up. We will need hundreds of thousands of charging stations over the next few years. Is that going to happen?
Also will there be enough electricity. At the moment there are few full electric cars, imagine the spike in demand with million of electric cars on charge all the time.
You make some very good arguments both regarding infrastructure and demand, but you ruin a good argument by posting a figure out of thin air re 'hundreds and thousands of charging stations' and not reading the post the other day which pointed out this was a nonsense figure with some compelling stats (that I was unaware of).
You should be given the benefit of the doubt that you missed that reply, but you do this all the time when you post something that may seem perfectly reasonable and then when it is shown to be wrong respond to the compelling argument by just coming back and repeating the original false item.
Shame because your post was good otherwise.
That driveway stat is a bit of a red herring.
Thankfully the majority (roughly 60:40) of UK dwellings have off street parking. Even more, those who don’t drive cars are over-represented in the dwellings with no car parking. PWC estimated that a chunky 72% of UK drivers have access to off-street parking at home. https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/electric-car-no-driveway
Gets overdone by the London lobby who unduly influence national debate, and like Allegra have good enough public transport.
1. I'm astonished 2. Off street parking can presumably mean an allocated spot in a private car park, so not necessarily immune to the trailing cables issue. 3. looking at the pwc report itself it says 78% not 72%.
Allegra has a very sensible point for a "long journeys on occasional weekends, and nothing in the week" pattern, but politics does not like sensible points. Love the Mirror describing a diesel golf as a "gas guzzler".
Very interesting programme by Guy Martin trying out electric cars last night on C4. He managed to eject himself out of the back of an electric mountain-bike. And did a Newcastle -> John O Groats and back electric journey in just over 24 hours.
Verdict: they go like stink; buy one now if your journeys are within 50 miles of home; if you drive a 200+ journey a couple of time a week wait 2 years.
I note that pure electric is now 11% of the new market.
IMO it will all be in place sufficiently by 2024-2025.
The new generation of top-of-the-range EVs do indeed go like stink.
The latest 2022 Tesla S Plaid can run the quarter mile in 9.2 seconds at 152mph. It costs £120k.
The only other cars close to that, are a £450k Ferrari SF90 or a £350k McLaren 765LT, both of which run around 9.4s.
Such accelerations are an utterly pointless metric, and nothing to do with normal road driving.
If you want to buy a track car, fair enough. But it has zero relevance to the everyday driver.
The point is that it is a side effect of the requirements for an EV drive train.
Electric motors are very, very powerful for their size. You can just about pick up an EV motor with your hands... Once you factor in the requirements for regenerative braking, larger motors are *required*
One that Musk was clever enough to see as a selling point - a 4 second car, not a milk float.
Why don't electric cars in general have manual gears, can somebody explain technically why this is, as I always felt too stupid to ask
The short answer is that EV do not require the use of a clutch or gears. As a result, they cannot stall at low speeds.
You absolutely can stall an electric car if the load on the motor is higher than the motor's LRT (locked rotor torque) although it is harder to do. Torque then drops slightly as motor speed increases to Pull Up Torque then dropping off steeply at Break Down Torque which generally occurs at around 80% of max motor speed.
I have a 19 year old Ford Focus which has done just 73K miles. It never goes more than 20 miles from home. It costs me almost nothing to run and there is obviously no depreciation. My wife and kids keep telling me to get something newer but I really don't see the point until it conks out. If it does then I will probably go for a small & cheap full EV.
Our other car though is a brand new Kia Sorento hybrid (not plug-in) for transporting the kids and all their gear. For such a tank it does return a surprisingly good 40mpg. When going at low speeds in our village it pretty much entirely runs electric and can do 550 miles on a tank of fuel. Given the recent petrol price rises that is now £70. It is on a 4 year lease and I expect that the car that replaces it will be full EV. There was no 7 seat full EV with that kind of range available at the moment. In 4 years time I anticipate the situation will be much improved.
I don't quite understand all the concerns about charging points. The vast majority of the population do not drive enough in a day to need charging when not at home. New build houses should be forced to install car charging points and councils should get on with putting chargers into lamp posts. Most people charge would charge overnight when you don't need super-fast charging. The big difference compared with petrol is that no one has ever filled up their car from a petrol pump at their own home before (unless they own a petrol station). This change in itself means that the requirement for away-from-home refilling is massively reduced with EV compared with ICE. I think most recharging needs will be solved by adding large numbers of charging points in the car parks at motorway services. That is when away-from-home charging is needed, not when popping to the local supermarket.
Allegra has a very sensible point for a "long journeys on occasional weekends, and nothing in the week" pattern, but politics does not like sensible points. Love the Mirror describing a diesel golf as a "gas guzzler".
Very interesting programme by Guy Martin trying out electric cars last night on C4. He managed to eject himself out of the back of an electric mountain-bike. And did a Newcastle -> John O Groats and back electric journey in just over 24 hours.
Verdict: they go like stink; buy one now if your journeys are within 50 miles of home; if you drive a 200+ journey a couple of time a week wait 2 years.
I note that pure electric is now 11% of the new market.
IMO it will all be in place sufficiently by 2024-2025.
The new generation of top-of-the-range EVs do indeed go like stink.
The latest 2022 Tesla S Plaid can run the quarter mile in 9.2 seconds at 152mph. It costs £120k.
The only other cars close to that, are a £450k Ferrari SF90 or a £350k McLaren 765LT, both of which run around 9.4s.
Such accelerations are an utterly pointless metric, and nothing to do with normal road driving.
If you want to buy a track car, fair enough. But it has zero relevance to the everyday driver.
Oh of course, no-one needs a nine second car, but it’s a good engineering exercise to do it.
They are a halo car, and Tesla will sell only a few hundred of them - mostly to the sort of mad Americans in the video, who spend their weekends at a drag strip! The presenter of that channel runs a magazine called Drag Times.
That sort of acceleration is actually quite uncomfortable, it’s like being on a roller-coaster.
The charging infrastructure is so far away at the moment, the majority of people do not have a driveway. Look at the queues at petrol stations and that takes a couple of minutes to fill up. We will need hundreds of thousands of charging stations over the next few years. Is that going to happen?
Also will there be enough electricity. At the moment there are few full electric cars, imagine the spike in demand with million of electric cars on charge all the time.
You make some very good arguments both regarding infrastructure and demand, but you ruin a good argument by posting a figure out of thin air re 'hundreds and thousands of charging stations' and not reading the post the other day which pointed out this was a nonsense figure with some compelling stats (that I was unaware of).
You should be given the benefit of the doubt that you missed that reply, but you do this all the time when you post something that may seem perfectly reasonable and then when it is shown to be wrong respond to the compelling argument by just coming back and repeating the original false item.
Shame because your post was good otherwise.
That driveway stat is a bit of a red herring.
Thankfully the majority (roughly 60:40) of UK dwellings have off street parking. Even more, those who don’t drive cars are over-represented in the dwellings with no car parking. PWC estimated that a chunky 72% of UK drivers have access to off-street parking at home. https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/electric-car-no-driveway
Gets overdone by the London lobby who unduly influence national debate, and like Allegra have good enough public transport.
Doesn't have to be new-builds which don't have street parking. A local small town, very old, has virtually nothing but street-parking in the main 'old' area, apart from a large but inadequate car park. When the houses were built, of course, one either walked out of the town, on the rare occasions when one wanted, or needed, to leave, or got the next available horse from the livery stables at the back of the largest local pub.
The reality is that EVs are still for many people an expensive novelty. Almost everyone I know drives a cheap petrol car. An EV is going to cost you £300 plus per month in leasing/depreciation costs. A decent second hand petrol car is closer to £100 per month. Old petrol cars can be kept going for 10-20 years. EV's are not going to last as long as the battery will go and will be uneconomic to replace....
Simply not true for some battery chemistries. The iron cathode LFP batteries, which are likely to be used in cheaper models (already used in some of Tesla's Chinese cars), have slightly lower performance, but are much more stable, and should last up to a million km.
By the time EVs are fully cost competitive with ICEs, battery life (as well as costs costs) ought to be much less of a concern.
Absolutely but as of today and over the next few years (how many? 3-5?) ain't no one hanging around for a 2nd hand Tesla at £30k +/-.
I can see a huge amount of inertia in changing to electric and that's aside from the "charging point in every lamp post" fallacy.
Cost and convenience have to change dramatically so Allegra is quite right in what she says. Or would people prefer her to go out and spaff £50k on an electric car and say "come on you lot what's keeping you?"
I'm taken aback by the number of PBers who are prepared to spend £40k+ on a car.
Most I've ever spent is £23k and I agonised over that. That car will last me at least 10 years.
What are the servicing costs involved with electric cars? What about when the batteries need replacing?
Yep absolutely. £23k out of your bank account is a huge amount and hence people do it on the never never which is of course a ticking time bomb for the govt, interest rate-wise.
My friend visited the other day in his new car, a £85k Audi electric car. He didn't cough up £85k though, he leases it.
He runs his own ltd company and the reason he went electric is purely down to government incentives. He reckons that the end cost to him when you factor in the tax breaks and the ability to, in effect, get money efficiently out of his ltd company is under £500pm. A £85k car becomes much more feasible when you look at it like that.
For sure. And even for "ordinary" people a monthly lease amount in the hundreds of pounds is much more digestible than the upfront cost of the car they want.
Still £6k a year to run a car though. And his wife has a car too. Ouch.
Versus cash buy a £20k petrol or diesel and keep for 10 years = £2k pa depreciation.
Not as a company car. If it’s an ICE car, and you’re a higher rate taxpayer, you also have to pay several hundred quid a month in tax for the benefit in kind.
Are you sure? I'm sure he said to me that no P11d benefits apply as it is electric.
That’s correct, you only pay the large BIK tax bill for an ICE car. For an EV it’s 1%
rising to 2% in 2022 with confirmation that it will remain at 2% until 2025.
If you can get a company car going EV is a complete no brainer provided you can find a suitable lease.
Lol some massive inflation compared to recent cohorts
44% are A* or A (25.2% in 2019). 37.9% of students got three As or better (more than doubled from the 17.9% in 2019).
Totally as a result of the cowardly actions by The government in not resisting pressure to just accepting teacher assessment.The government have destroyed credibilty in the results and therefore the exams
Yep.
Ofsted designed the best system in the circs last year and got misunderstood and pilloried - and Sturgeon politicked it - and here we are.
Why don't electric cars in general have manual gears, can somebody explain technically why this is, as I always felt too stupid to ask
The short answer is that EV do not require the use of a clutch or gears. As a result, they cannot stall at low speeds.
You absolutely can stall an electric car if the load on the motor is higher than the motor's LRT (locked rotor torque) although it is harder to do. Torque then drops slightly as motor speed increases to Pull Up Torque then dropping off steeply at Break Down Torque which generally occurs at around 80% of max motor speed.
The reality is that EVs are still for many people an expensive novelty. Almost everyone I know drives a cheap petrol car. An EV is going to cost you £300 plus per month in leasing/depreciation costs. A decent second hand petrol car is closer to £100 per month. Old petrol cars can be kept going for 10-20 years. EV's are not going to last as long as the battery will go and will be uneconomic to replace....
Simply not true for some battery chemistries. The iron cathode LFP batteries, which are likely to be used in cheaper models (already used in some of Tesla's Chinese cars), have slightly lower performance, but are much more stable, and should last up to a million km.
By the time EVs are fully cost competitive with ICEs, battery life (as well as costs costs) ought to be much less of a concern.
Absolutely but as of today and over the next few years (how many? 3-5?) ain't no one hanging around for a 2nd hand Tesla at £30k +/-.
I can see a huge amount of inertia in changing to electric and that's aside from the "charging point in every lamp post" fallacy.
Cost and convenience have to change dramatically so Allegra is quite right in what she says. Or would people prefer her to go out and spaff £50k on an electric car and say "come on you lot what's keeping you?"
Thing is, she's supposed to be a spokesperson for the government, not a tribune of the people. It's their, and her business to explain how they propose to get from where we are now to where you want to be.
I didn't see her comments. Did she not do that? She said, reasonably, that she preferred a diesel car today. Did she say for now and evermore? I haven't looked.
Plus can people please lose the "lampost charging" fantasy.
Lamposts are on streets which either have yellow lines or cars parked beside them. They are not dedicated charging stations, which is what is needed. There will need to be such dedicated bays up and down the country. Every or close to every current pay & display space will have to have access to a charger.
At present I reckon around 0.01% of them are such.
This is a huge infrastructure project that I don't see the government addressing now or perhaps for the next decade.
Absolutely! The average person will not buy an EV is they have nowhere to charge it.
This reminds me of the get rid of boilers nonsense and the replace them with an Air/Ground Sourced Heat Pump. This will simply not happen as the vast majority of people do not have a Plant Room in their house to put all the required equipment in, (and ASHP will not warm a normal house very effectively)
Leaving aside whether some of these things are actually practically possible as opposed to just expensive, I do wonder whether some of these emerging Govt policies are being produced by scientists and others on a “money is no object” basis. With Govt ministers not really understanding the technology and implications before apparently adopting as policy.
I think ministers not really understanding the technology and implications is a given. Very few have any science or engineering knowledge whatsoever. Also true for many civil servants with the exception of those working in their field of speciality.
Therese Coffey, the Work and Pensions secretary, has a PhD in Chemistry.
However it is hardly surprising that most politicians have degrees in history, politics and law etc rather than science and that most scientists prefer to go into industry or the city or medicine or actually do scientific research than become politicians.
However ministers can also hire top rate scientific advisers and academics if they need to
I credit Tesla for making electric cars desirable to the general population, but in my view most current EVs, in particular Tesla, are massively overengineered.
EVs are the ideal vehicle for the suburbs, where 90% probably of all journeys are made. Electric motors have plenty of torque, which means you get decent performance on a low power motor up to about 50mph, which are the speeds you are going at in the suburbs. Electric motors are also smaller than the ICEs they replace. The way forward, I think is slightly smaller cars, matched to smaller motors and smaller batteries. Batteries are why EVs are more expensive than their ICE equivalents. By making them smaller, you make the car more affordable, lighter, quicker to charge and with more range per KWH, enough for a week's normal use.
Then you try to make the remaining 10% of journeys acceptable, but no more. This takes a change in mindset.
The engineering doesn't work that way. For a number of years, people tried to build electric cars to reduce the cost of the drive train. Primarily the battery size. The result were short ranged cars with such low performance that they were dangerous to drive on motorways.
The acceleration that modern EVs get is the side effect of a drive trained optimised for general usage - the brutal torque curve of electric motors is a natural feature. For decent range, you need regenerative breaking, for example. Which drives battery size up.
The "genius" in Tesla, was looking at the car conversion industry in LA, where for 200K+ you could have your Porsche made electric, and realising that the real costs in that were the one-off work and the battery. The other key insight is that batteries are dropping in price each year and increasing performance. At the same time.
I don't think that changes my point however. Starting with the battery, you work out how to get the most out of it, trading off performance against range. My point is that given most journeys are suburban, where you will get decent performance on a relatively low power set up, you should prioritise range over performance. Or to put it another way, you can get to a certain range with a smaller battery, with the benefits of a more affordable car and quicker charging times.
Why don't electric cars in general have manual gears, can somebody explain technically why this is, as I always felt too stupid to ask
With an internal combustion engine you need to transmit the required amount of torque to the wheels to drive the car. When accelerating you need a lot of torque. Because ICE + gearbox are inefficient and the power & torque band narrow you need gearing to keep the car moving. Once you're up to speed you need little power and torque to maintain speed so want a very long gear to make not many turns of the engine into many many turns of the wheel.
An electric motor is very different. 100% of the power and torque is available from 0 rpm. It is very efficient in transmitting power to the wheels so no gears are needed - all the power is available all the time.
The other bonus is regeneration. A motor is also a generator. Take your kinetic energy of moving forward and run it in reverse through the motor and you recharge your battery by slowing down *and* don't use consumables like brake pads and discs. (For me) the best EVs have paddles behind the wheel to adjust the amount of regen. Keep it off to let the car roll and burn zero power, and add steps of regen to slow down when required. Once you are at road speed with zero resistance from a gearbox you can coast a long way!
Some manufacturers try and keep things simple. Regen is either a selector (high / low) or can't be adjusted other than "e-Pedal"/one-pedal driving. Personally I hate max regen / 1 pedal as you are always burning power up until you start to brake / regen. Which eradicates coasting and all the efficiency that brings. And I don't get why some manufacturers don't let you adjust this - even Tesla. I can thrash my wife's Ioniq as much as any hot hatch - huge instant power off the motor for point and squirt fun, then dial in regen to toe the nose round corners. Can't do that in a Tesla...
If he loved Barcelona so much, why not play for them for free?...
[T]he notion the world’s most gifted footballer should simply offer his services pro bono betrays a telling lack of perspective.
Whilst the situation may have been beyond recovery at this point, the real issue is that Messi has drained Barca over the last few years. It reminds me a little bit of Ayrton Senna and McLaren. Senna thought that to be considered the best he had to be paid the most by a long way. And whilst McLaren were spending silly money on Senna's salary, Williams were spending money on Adrian Newey.
The good news for Messi is that his greed probably won't lead indirectly to his death.
I credit Tesla for making electric cars desirable to the general population, but in my view most current EVs, in particular Tesla, are massively overengineered.
EVs are the ideal vehicle for the suburbs, where 90% probably of all journeys are made. Electric motors have plenty of torque, which means you get decent performance on a low power motor up to about 50mph, which are the speeds you are going at in the suburbs. Electric motors are also smaller than the ICEs they replace. The way forward, I think is slightly smaller cars, matched to smaller motors and smaller batteries. Batteries are why EVs are more expensive than their ICE equivalents. By making them smaller, you make the car more affordable, lighter, quicker to charge and with more range per KWH, enough for a week's normal use.
Then you try to make the remaining 10% of journeys acceptable, but no more. This takes a change in mindset.
The engineering doesn't work that way. For a number of years, people tried to build electric cars to reduce the cost of the drive train. Primarily the battery size. The result were short ranged cars with such low performance that they were dangerous to drive on motorways.
The acceleration that modern EVs get is the side effect of a drive trained optimised for general usage - the brutal torque curve of electric motors is a natural feature. For decent range, you need regenerative breaking, for example. Which drives battery size up.
The "genius" in Tesla, was looking at the car conversion industry in LA, where for 200K+ you could have your Porsche made electric, and realising that the real costs in that were the one-off work and the battery. The other key insight is that batteries are dropping in price each year and increasing performance. At the same time.
I don't think that changes my point however. Starting with the battery, you work out how to get the most out of it, trading off performance against range. My point is that given most journeys are suburban, where you will get decent performance on a relatively low power set up, you should prioritise range over performance. Or to put it another way, you can get to a certain range with a smaller battery, with the benefits of a more affordable car and quicker charging times.
Reducing the max rated power of the motors doesn't increase range very much. Electric motors have a surprisingly wide efficiency range, and smaller motors don't scale in weight linearly.
Lol some massive inflation compared to recent cohorts
44% are A* or A (25.2% in 2019). 37.9% of students got three As or better (more than doubled from the 17.9% in 2019).
Totally as a result of the cowardly actions by The government in not resisting pressure to just accepting teacher assessment.The government have destroyed credibilty in the results and therefore the exams
Yep.
Ofsted designed the best system in the circs last year and got misunderstood and pilloried - and Sturgeon politicked it - and here we are.
For the record: Ofqual, not Ofsted.
OFQUAL did not design the system last year, nor did they know until Johnson announced it in public that exams would be cancelled. Indeed, until literally that moment they were still telling schools they would be going ahead. Their anger at being cut out of decision making is one reason why they were cut out of planning further and seem to have gone for a prolonged sulk this year - not helped by having been blamed for last year’s utter fiasco, which was the DfE’s own brainchild.
They are pretty useless and incompetent, but let’s blame them for what they do, not for what they don’t.
The charging infrastructure is so far away at the moment, the majority of people do not have a driveway. Look at the queues at petrol stations and that takes a couple of minutes to fill up. We will need hundreds of thousands of charging stations over the next few years. Is that going to happen?
Also will there be enough electricity. At the moment there are few full electric cars, imagine the spike in demand with million of electric cars on charge all the time.
You make some very good arguments both regarding infrastructure and demand, but you ruin a good argument by posting a figure out of thin air re 'hundreds and thousands of charging stations' and not reading the post the other day which pointed out this was a nonsense figure with some compelling stats (that I was unaware of).
You should be given the benefit of the doubt that you missed that reply, but you do this all the time when you post something that may seem perfectly reasonable and then when it is shown to be wrong respond to the compelling argument by just coming back and repeating the original false item.
Shame because your post was good otherwise.
That driveway stat is a bit of a red herring.
Thankfully the majority (roughly 60:40) of UK dwellings have off street parking. Even more, those who don’t drive cars are over-represented in the dwellings with no car parking. PWC estimated that a chunky 72% of UK drivers have access to off-street parking at home. https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/electric-car-no-driveway
Gets overdone by the London lobby who unduly influence national debate, and like Allegra have good enough public transport.
Sorry but that's ridiculous. So 28% of all drivers don't have access to off-street parking and that makes the issue a red herring?
If an issue is a deal-breaker for more than a quarter of the cars on the road then I'd call that pretty serious and not a red-herring.
There’s an interesting by election in my ward on Newcastle City Council on Thursday. The Cons are doing better here on a local level and its a Lib Dem defence (following the unfortunate death of a councillor).
I’ll be voting LDs I think as Labour don’t need any more councillors on NCC.
Lol some massive inflation compared to recent cohorts
44% are A* or A (25.2% in 2019). 37.9% of students got three As or better (more than doubled from the 17.9% in 2019).
Totally as a result of the cowardly actions by The government in not resisting pressure to just accepting teacher assessment.The government have destroyed credibilty in the results and therefore the exams
Yep.
Ofsted designed the best system in the circs last year and got misunderstood and pilloried - and Sturgeon politicked it - and here we are.
For the record: Ofqual, not Ofsted.
OFQUAL did not design the system last year, nor did they know until Johnson announced it in public that exams would be cancelled. Indeed, until literally that moment they were still telling schools they would be going ahead. Their anger at being cut out of decision making is one reason why they were cut out of planning further and seem to have gone for a prolonged sulk this year - not helped by having been blamed for last year’s utter fiasco, which was the DfE’s own brainchild.
They are pretty useless and incompetent, but let’s blame them for what they do, not for what they don’t.
Apologies - Ofqual - I wasn't criticising them I was sticking up for them!
I credit Tesla for making electric cars desirable to the general population, but in my view most current EVs, in particular Tesla, are massively overengineered.
EVs are the ideal vehicle for the suburbs, where 90% probably of all journeys are made. Electric motors have plenty of torque, which means you get decent performance on a low power motor up to about 50mph, which are the speeds you are going at in the suburbs. Electric motors are also smaller than the ICEs they replace. The way forward, I think is slightly smaller cars, matched to smaller motors and smaller batteries. Batteries are why EVs are more expensive than their ICE equivalents. By making them smaller, you make the car more affordable, lighter, quicker to charge and with more range per KWH, enough for a week's normal use.
Then you try to make the remaining 10% of journeys acceptable, but no more. This takes a change in mindset.
The engineering doesn't work that way. For a number of years, people tried to build electric cars to reduce the cost of the drive train. Primarily the battery size. The result were short ranged cars with such low performance that they were dangerous to drive on motorways.
The acceleration that modern EVs get is the side effect of a drive trained optimised for general usage - the brutal torque curve of electric motors is a natural feature. For decent range, you need regenerative breaking, for example. Which drives battery size up.
The "genius" in Tesla, was looking at the car conversion industry in LA, where for 200K+ you could have your Porsche made electric, and realising that the real costs in that were the one-off work and the battery. The other key insight is that batteries are dropping in price each year and increasing performance. At the same time.
I don't think that changes my point however. Starting with the battery, you work out how to get the most out of it, trading off performance against range. My point is that given most journeys are suburban, where you will get decent performance on a relatively low power set up, you should prioritise range over performance. Or to put it another way, you can get to a certain range with a smaller battery, with the benefits of a more affordable car and quicker charging times.
Reducing the max rated power of the motors doesn't increase range very much. Electric motors have a surprisingly wide efficiency range, and smaller motors don't scale in weight linearly.
Range is mostly a function of battery size.
The other big difference, is that EV’s are most efficient when driving slowly through urban areas, where ICE cars are very poor.
Going 65 rather than 75 on a long journey makes a massive difference to range, as wind resistance is proportional to the square of the speed. That also holds for ICE cars, but we don’t notice as we can fill them up in five minutes.
This is massively exaggerated with roof racks, trailers, caravans etc. A Tesla towing a caravan can go from full to empty in 100 miles.
Anyone else find the annual hand-wringing and 'education is in crisis' day that is 'A' level results day has become a perennial and total bore?
And knocking the lads lasses achievements doesn't do them any good. They can only answer the questions in front of them to the best of their ability. What grade inflation suggests to me is that teachers have become better at teaching.
Lol some massive inflation compared to recent cohorts
44% are A* or A (25.2% in 2019). 37.9% of students got three As or better (more than doubled from the 17.9% in 2019).
Totally as a result of the cowardly actions by The government in not resisting pressure to just accepting teacher assessment.The government have destroyed credibilty in the results and therefore the exams
Yep.
Ofsted designed the best system in the circs last year and got misunderstood and pilloried - and Sturgeon politicked it - and here we are.
For the record: Ofqual, not Ofsted.
OFQUAL did not design the system last year, nor did they know until Johnson announced it in public that exams would be cancelled. Indeed, until literally that moment they were still telling schools they would be going ahead. Their anger at being cut out of decision making is one reason why they were cut out of planning further and seem to have gone for a prolonged sulk this year - not helped by having been blamed for last year’s utter fiasco, which was the DfE’s own brainchild.
They are pretty useless and incompetent, but let’s blame them for what they do, not for what they don’t.
Apologies - Ofqual - I wasn't criticising them I was sticking up for them!
Well, my advice is, don’t. This had nothing to do with them either way, but tbh, they’re still not worth the effort.
I don't quite understand all the concerns about charging points. The vast majority of the population do not drive enough in a day to need charging when not at home. New build houses should be forced to install car charging points and councils should get on with putting chargers into lamp posts. Most people charge would charge overnight when you don't need super-fast charging. The big difference compared with petrol is that no one has ever filled up their car from a petrol pump at their own home before (unless they own a petrol station).
This change in itself means that the requirement for away-from-home refilling is massively reduced with EV compared with ICE. I think most recharging needs will be solved by adding large numbers of charging points in the car parks at motorway services. That is when away-from-home charging is needed, not when popping to the local supermarket.
I don't share this view. I don't think we are likely to retrofit 20 million homes with charging points any time soon. Yes, most have off-road parking, but that does not mean they will all be convenient. Not all occupiers have the right to install chargers or the incentive to do so.
I think provision at supermarkets will be vital to take up. Even on road trips not everywhere is close to a service station. Much better if you could reliably assume that every Sainsburys would allow you to pick up your suntan lotion/umbrella and charge your car at the same time.
I credit Tesla for making electric cars desirable to the general population, but in my view most current EVs, in particular Tesla, are massively overengineered.
EVs are the ideal vehicle for the suburbs, where 90% probably of all journeys are made. Electric motors have plenty of torque, which means you get decent performance on a low power motor up to about 50mph, which are the speeds you are going at in the suburbs. Electric motors are also smaller than the ICEs they replace. The way forward, I think is slightly smaller cars, matched to smaller motors and smaller batteries. Batteries are why EVs are more expensive than their ICE equivalents. By making them smaller, you make the car more affordable, lighter, quicker to charge and with more range per KWH, enough for a week's normal use.
Then you try to make the remaining 10% of journeys acceptable, but no more. This takes a change in mindset.
The engineering doesn't work that way. For a number of years, people tried to build electric cars to reduce the cost of the drive train. Primarily the battery size. The result were short ranged cars with such low performance that they were dangerous to drive on motorways.
The acceleration that modern EVs get is the side effect of a drive trained optimised for general usage - the brutal torque curve of electric motors is a natural feature. For decent range, you need regenerative breaking, for example. Which drives battery size up.
The "genius" in Tesla, was looking at the car conversion industry in LA, where for 200K+ you could have your Porsche made electric, and realising that the real costs in that were the one-off work and the battery. The other key insight is that batteries are dropping in price each year and increasing performance. At the same time.
I don't think that changes my point however. Starting with the battery, you work out how to get the most out of it, trading off performance against range. My point is that given most journeys are suburban, where you will get decent performance on a relatively low power set up, you should prioritise range over performance. Or to put it another way, you can get to a certain range with a smaller battery, with the benefits of a more affordable car and quicker charging times.
Reducing the max rated power of the motors doesn't increase range very much. Electric motors have a surprisingly wide efficiency range, and smaller motors don't scale in weight linearly.
Range is mostly a function of battery size.
The other big difference, is that EV’s are most efficient when driving slowly through urban areas, where ICE cars are very poor.
Going 65 rather than 75 on a long journey makes a massive difference to range, as wind resistance is proportional to the square of the speed. That also holds for ICE cars, but we don’t notice as we can fill them up in five minutes.
This is massively exaggerated with roof racks, trailers, caravans etc. A Tesla towing a caravan can go from full to empty in 100 miles.
Yeah - there is a challenge in Australia, how far can you go on one charge in a Tesla. At 30 mph, the range in incredible....
Mind you, a relative was towing 2 tons behind a Model X. The range didn't go down that much....
What are the servicing costs involved with electric cars?
The Taycan is about the same as any other Porsche at the dealer at about 1,200 quid. You only have to have it done every two years though.
Forgive my ignorance but do electric cars have gears? If not, and if I were to be convinced that gearless cars will be standard soon, then why is my daughter* bothering to learn to drive in a manual?
(*She narrowly failed a practice theory test this week (85% pass mark required!) and one of the questions she got wrong was about a situation involving a milk float. She doesn't know what a milk float is. Why would she FFS - she's 17 and never seen one in her life.)
All electric? No, mad Porsche aside. My eldest learned in an auto as what is the point now of learning a stick shift? Once you have a motor as transmission you do not want to go back to a gearbox.
Yes, I'm sure this is right, but most learner drivers still learn in a manual because they (rightly or wrongly) think that renting a car when abroad is likely to be a manual and if you pass your test in an automatic you are only licensed (and able!) to drive an automatic.
Everyone should learn in a manual, you're just restricting yourself if you don't.
Well I agree - but many PBers seem to think that it will be all-electric in the not too dim-and-distant, hence my point.
Anyone else find the annual hand-wringing and 'education is in crisis' day that is 'A' level results day has become a perennial and total bore?
This year, however, education really is in crisis. All the issues that have been festering for years have been brought to the boil by Covid.
The worry is I don’t see how things will get better rathe than worse over the next 18 months. We still have no clue what assessments will be like next year, as the proposed system is totally unworkable.
Philip Cowley @philipjcowley · Aug 18, 2016 Middle aged people who did A levels decades ago: today is not about you.
It is if they are admissions tutors at Russell Group universities today who face a nightmare choosing between the 45% of A Level candidates who have A* or A grades today.
If exams and assessments do not properly distinguish between candidates academically, then admission to our top universities and hence top jobs becomes a lottery
There’s an interesting by election in my ward on Newcastle City Council on Thursday. The Cons are doing better here on a local level and its a Lib Dem defence (following the unfortunate death of a councillor).
I’ll be voting LDs I think as Labour don’t need any more councillors on NCC.
There is a not a single Conservative councillor on Newcastle City Council, they could do with 1
Anyone else find the annual hand-wringing and 'education is in crisis' day that is 'A' level results day has become a perennial and total bore?
This year, however, education really is in crisis. All the issues that have been festering for years have been brought to the boil by Covid.
The worry is I don’t see how things will get better rathe than worse over the next 18 months. We still have no clue what assessments will be like next year, as the proposed system is totally unworkable.
Ok, but the problem with commentators (not you) saying 'education is in crisis' in all the other years since I did my own 'A' levels* is when there is a crisis most of us have long zoned out.
* that really was a crisis year as I was really worried I would flunk the applied maths paper.
The charging infrastructure is so far away at the moment, the majority of people do not have a driveway. Look at the queues at petrol stations and that takes a couple of minutes to fill up. We will need hundreds of thousands of charging stations over the next few years. Is that going to happen?
Also will there be enough electricity. At the moment there are few full electric cars, imagine the spike in demand with million of electric cars on charge all the time.
You make some very good arguments both regarding infrastructure and demand, but you ruin a good argument by posting a figure out of thin air re 'hundreds and thousands of charging stations' and not reading the post the other day which pointed out this was a nonsense figure with some compelling stats (that I was unaware of).
You should be given the benefit of the doubt that you missed that reply, but you do this all the time when you post something that may seem perfectly reasonable and then when it is shown to be wrong respond to the compelling argument by just coming back and repeating the original false item.
Shame because your post was good otherwise.
That driveway stat is a bit of a red herring.
Thankfully the majority (roughly 60:40) of UK dwellings have off street parking. Even more, those who don’t drive cars are over-represented in the dwellings with no car parking. PWC estimated that a chunky 72% of UK drivers have access to off-street parking at home. https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/electric-car-no-driveway
Gets overdone by the London lobby who unduly influence national debate, and like Allegra have good enough public transport.
Sorry but that's ridiculous. So 28% of all drivers don't have access to off-street parking and that makes the issue a red herring?
If an issue is a deal-breaker for more than a quarter of the cars on the road then I'd call that pretty serious and not a red-herring.
It's about slicing the problem down - you can nearly never solve a problem with one fix, in one go.
In any event, fast charging is taking over quite rapidly. My guess is that overnight trickle charging will become a nice-to-have. I know a couple of people who own EVs, in flats with no off street parking.
There’s an interesting by election in my ward on Newcastle City Council on Thursday. The Cons are doing better here on a local level and its a Lib Dem defence (following the unfortunate death of a councillor).
I’ll be voting LDs I think as Labour don’t need any more councillors on NCC.
There is a not a single Conservative councillor on Newcastle City Council, they could do with 1
Don’t think they deserve it to be honest but my fellow residents may disagree
Philip Cowley @philipjcowley · Aug 18, 2016 Middle aged people who did A levels decades ago: today is not about you.
It is if they are admissions tutors at Russell Group universities today who face a nightmare choosing between the 45% of A Level candidates who have A* or A grades today.
If exams and assessments do not properly distinguish between candidates academically, then admission to our top universities and hence top jobs becomes a lottery
Philip Cowley @philipjcowley · Aug 18, 2016 Middle aged people who did A levels decades ago: today is not about you.
It is if they are admissions tutors at Russell Group universities today who face a nightmare choosing between the 45% of A Level candidates who have A* or A grades today.
If exams and assessments do not properly distinguish between candidates academically, then admission to our top universities and hence top jobs becomes a lottery
Well, I did A levels 64 years ago and from what I saw of the one subject I and my children and grandchildren had in common it's harder now.
Anyone else find the annual hand-wringing and 'education is in crisis' day that is 'A' level results day has become a perennial and total bore?
And knocking the lads lasses achievements doesn't do them any good. They can only answer the questions in front of them to the best of their ability. What grade inflation suggests to me is that teachers have become better at teaching.
I would be very surprised if teaching hadn't got better since my day. The text books are infinitely better designed. There is technology and the Internet to support them. There are teaching assistants. We probably know scientifically more about how people learn.
The reality is that EVs are still for many people an expensive novelty. Almost everyone I know drives a cheap petrol car. An EV is going to cost you £300 plus per month in leasing/depreciation costs. A decent second hand petrol car is closer to £100 per month. Old petrol cars can be kept going for 10-20 years. EV's are not going to last as long as the battery will go and will be uneconomic to replace....
Simply not true for some battery chemistries. The iron cathode LFP batteries, which are likely to be used in cheaper models (already used in some of Tesla's Chinese cars), have slightly lower performance, but are much more stable, and should last up to a million km.
By the time EVs are fully cost competitive with ICEs, battery life (as well as costs costs) ought to be much less of a concern.
Absolutely but as of today and over the next few years (how many? 3-5?) ain't no one hanging around for a 2nd hand Tesla at £30k +/-.
I can see a huge amount of inertia in changing to electric and that's aside from the "charging point in every lamp post" fallacy.
Cost and convenience have to change dramatically so Allegra is quite right in what she says. Or would people prefer her to go out and spaff £50k on an electric car and say "come on you lot what's keeping you?"
Thing is, she's supposed to be a spokesperson for the government, not a tribune of the people. It's their, and her business to explain how they propose to get from where we are now to where you want to be.
I didn't see her comments. Did she not do that? She said, reasonably, that she preferred a diesel car today. Did she say for now and evermore? I haven't looked.
Plus can people please lose the "lampost charging" fantasy.
Lamposts are on streets which either have yellow lines or cars parked beside them. They are not dedicated charging stations, which is what is needed. There will need to be such dedicated bays up and down the country. Every or close to every current pay & display space will have to have access to a charger.
At present I reckon around 0.01% of them are such.
This is a huge infrastructure project that I don't see the government addressing now or perhaps for the next decade.
Absolutely! The average person will not buy an EV is they have nowhere to charge it.
This reminds me of the get rid of boilers nonsense and the replace them with an Air/Ground Sourced Heat Pump. This will simply not happen as the vast majority of people do not have a Plant Room in their house to put all the required equipment in, (and ASHP will not warm a normal house very effectively)
Leaving aside whether some of these things are actually practically possible as opposed to just expensive, I do wonder whether some of these emerging Govt policies are being produced by scientists and others on a “money is no object” basis. With Govt ministers not really understanding the technology and implications before apparently adopting as policy.
I think ministers not really understanding the technology and implications is a given. Very few have any science or engineering knowledge whatsoever. Also true for many civil servants with the exception of those working in their field of speciality.
Therese Coffey, the Work and Pensions secretary, has a PhD in Chemistry.
However it is hardly surprising that most politicians have degrees in history, politics and law etc rather than science and that most scientists prefer to go into industry or the city or medicine or actually do scientific research than become politicians.
However ministers can also hire top rate scientific advisers and academics if they need to
Yes, however this is slightly missing my point (and is actually relevant for the whole Covid/SAGE discussion). That there is a danger that policies get formulated by "expert" groups, that don't just only fail to consider the full picture (particularly from a financial aspect), but don't even make reference to it. Perhaps at a push they might deign to include a few paragraphs citing that "the cost of inaction is unquantifiable (but implicitly large)" such that the Government will be expected to pay for any alternative offered to inaction.
Part of the problem with the whole climate change situation is that there are sound arguments for thinking that ultimately solutions will be found and invested in by "the market" since at some point the market will recognise that they have no choice. But by the time that becomes the market consensus and they go hell for leather, it will likely be too late.
So the upfront action has to come from Governments, but where this action is expensive and/or unpopular (and has negative short or even medium term economic consequences) they can't do it either in democratic societies.
There’s an interesting by election in my ward on Newcastle City Council on Thursday. The Cons are doing better here on a local level and its a Lib Dem defence (following the unfortunate death of a councillor).
I’ll be voting LDs I think as Labour don’t need any more councillors on NCC.
There is a not a single Conservative councillor on Newcastle City Council, they could do with 1
Don’t think they deserve it to be honest but my fellow residents may disagree
17.6% of Newcastle voters voted Tory in May but they had no representation, so regardless of whether you hate the Tories or not it would be nice if they got at least 1 councillor to represent their views out of 78
Lol some massive inflation compared to recent cohorts
44% are A* or A (25.2% in 2019). 37.9% of students got three As or better (more than doubled from the 17.9% in 2019).
Totally as a result of the cowardly actions by The government in not resisting pressure to just accepting teacher assessment.The government have destroyed credibilty in the results and therefore the exams
Yep.
Ofsted designed the best system in the circs last year and got misunderstood and pilloried - and Sturgeon politicked it - and here we are.
For the record: Ofqual, not Ofsted.
OFQUAL did not design the system last year, nor did they know until Johnson announced it in public that exams would be cancelled. Indeed, until literally that moment they were still telling schools they would be going ahead. Their anger at being cut out of decision making is one reason why they were cut out of planning further and seem to have gone for a prolonged sulk this year - not helped by having been blamed for last year’s utter fiasco, which was the DfE’s own brainchild.
They are pretty useless and incompetent, but let’s blame them for what they do, not for what they don’t.
Yes, I know. I was merely pointing out that Ofsted has nothing whatsoever to do with the exam/assessment system, other than inspecting the outcomes.
Is this chart genuine doe anyone know please? If it is then in the future there will be no trust in anyone with A Levels from 2020 and 2021. This does a massive disservice to those genuinely deserving of A grades.
There’s an interesting by election in my ward on Newcastle City Council on Thursday. The Cons are doing better here on a local level and its a Lib Dem defence (following the unfortunate death of a councillor).
I’ll be voting LDs I think as Labour don’t need any more councillors on NCC.
There is a not a single Conservative councillor on Newcastle City Council, they could do with 1
Don’t think they deserve it to be honest but my fellow residents may disagree
17.6% of Newcastle voters voted Tory in May but they had no representation, so regardless of whether you hate the Tories or not it would be nice if they got at least 1 councillor to represent their views out of 78
Philip Cowley @philipjcowley · Aug 18, 2016 Middle aged people who did A levels decades ago: today is not about you.
It is if they are admissions tutors at Russell Group universities today who face a nightmare choosing between the 45% of A Level candidates who have A* or A grades today.
If exams and assessments do not properly distinguish between candidates academically, then admission to our top universities and hence top jobs becomes a lottery
Well, I did A levels 64 years ago and from what I saw of the one subject I and my children and grandchildren had in common it's harder now.
Yes but clearly that is not filtering through to the results if almost half the candidates are getting top grades and A* and A grades.
No more than 10% should ever get an A* or A grade level and only 3% max should get an A* grade if exams are to do their job
On topic, I’ll be buying an electric vehicle (or a hybrid at the very least) as soon as my 2007 Fiesta packs up and the law money starts rolling in
Why? What is the main reason? I'm curious to know when you can buy, for example, a small petrol for £12k when a small electric of equivalent size is (I think) £25k plus.
Anyone else find the annual hand-wringing and 'education is in crisis' day that is 'A' level results day has become a perennial and total bore?
And knocking the lads lasses achievements doesn't do them any good. They can only answer the questions in front of them to the best of their ability. What grade inflation suggests to me is that teachers have become better at teaching.
It’s also not helpful unless somebody has a better system to put forward.
The irony is that last summer there was a proposal to do just that. The exam boards and Ofqual had agreed a system whereby grades would be taken in monthly for each student. Then, if exams were cancelled, an average of those grades could be used. Any possible issues would be flagged up well in advance and a proper inspection ordered to see what was happening. Now I’m strongly critical of both groups. But as a reasonable substitute in impossible times, it was a decent idea.
What happened? The DfE ordered it scrapped, on the grounds there was no possibility exams would be cancelled again, so it was a waste of time and money. And that was the DfE. Not ministers.
It’s thoroughly disheartening to realise just how useless the people running the country can be.
I think everyone involved has done their best, and it’s not been easy for either the children with multiple extra exams or for the teachers with the extra workload generated. Sure there will be a few teachers who have pushed the envelope and the Daily Wail will scream about them for weeks. But then, principal examiners at exam boards have been known to quietly adjust the marking for their own students. I’ve blown the whistle on it and I wasn’t popular.
The key now is to accept we are where we are, that this is the best that could have been achieved after earlier serious mistakes and move on from there.
That does not mean heads should not roll, however, as several people have shown they have neither the intelligence or the judgement to manage the roles they have.
So to OldKingCole’s grandson and Big-G’s granddaughter, I hope congratulations on getting on their uni courses are in order and they have a much more productive time at uni than they’ve had in FE.
If the story is as it's been reported he has every right to do so - the nursery has been caught bang to rights.
I think what some of Twitter is missing is that to test the admission processes, a number of children (not sure if real or fictional) children were entered who where not the children of prominent SNP politicians.
There’s an interesting by election in my ward on Newcastle City Council on Thursday. The Cons are doing better here on a local level and its a Lib Dem defence (following the unfortunate death of a councillor).
I’ll be voting LDs I think as Labour don’t need any more councillors on NCC.
There is a not a single Conservative councillor on Newcastle City Council, they could do with 1
Don’t think they deserve it to be honest but my fellow residents may disagree
17.6% of Newcastle voters voted Tory in May but they had no representation, so regardless of whether you hate the Tories or not it would be nice if they got at least 1 councillor to represent their views out of 78
Another convert to Proportional Representation!
You'll be up for a severe telling off by Ms Priti Patel!
Philip Cowley @philipjcowley · Aug 18, 2016 Middle aged people who did A levels decades ago: today is not about you.
It is if they are admissions tutors at Russell Group universities today who face a nightmare choosing between the 45% of A Level candidates who have A* or A grades today.
If exams and assessments do not properly distinguish between candidates academically, then admission to our top universities and hence top jobs becomes a lottery
Some are proposing admission tests.
Yes, many might introduce US style SATs with A levels then just becoming an initial filter for them
Polybius (because I know you're all fascinated): now onto the Penguin bits that Oxford lacks. This includes a fun section on all the devices Archimedes invented (no solar death ray mentioned although that may come later) to fend off the Romans at Syracuse, that proved so effective they went from "let's storm the city" to "let's have a prolonged siege and starve them out" practically overnight.
As Polybius notes, that one man made a massive difference.
Philip Cowley @philipjcowley · Aug 18, 2016 Middle aged people who did A levels decades ago: today is not about you.
It is if they are admissions tutors at Russell Group universities today who face a nightmare choosing between the 45% of A Level candidates who have A* or A grades today.
If exams and assessments do not properly distinguish between candidates academically, then admission to our top universities and hence top jobs becomes a lottery
Is this chart genuine doe anyone know please? If it is then in the future there will be no trust in anyone with A Levels from 2020 and 2021. This does a massive disservice to those genuinely deserving of A grades.
I don't think it will be an issue. Let's be honest, how many employers really care about A Levels? The bigger issue is university admissions.
The reality is that EVs are still for many people an expensive novelty. Almost everyone I know drives a cheap petrol car. An EV is going to cost you £300 plus per month in leasing/depreciation costs. A decent second hand petrol car is closer to £100 per month. Old petrol cars can be kept going for 10-20 years. EV's are not going to last as long as the battery will go and will be uneconomic to replace....
Simply not true for some battery chemistries. The iron cathode LFP batteries, which are likely to be used in cheaper models (already used in some of Tesla's Chinese cars), have slightly lower performance, but are much more stable, and should last up to a million km.
By the time EVs are fully cost competitive with ICEs, battery life (as well as costs costs) ought to be much less of a concern.
Absolutely but as of today and over the next few years (how many? 3-5?) ain't no one hanging around for a 2nd hand Tesla at £30k +/-.
I can see a huge amount of inertia in changing to electric and that's aside from the "charging point in every lamp post" fallacy.
Cost and convenience have to change dramatically so Allegra is quite right in what she says. Or would people prefer her to go out and spaff £50k on an electric car and say "come on you lot what's keeping you?"
Thing is, she's supposed to be a spokesperson for the government, not a tribune of the people. It's their, and her business to explain how they propose to get from where we are now to where you want to be.
I didn't see her comments. Did she not do that? She said, reasonably, that she preferred a diesel car today. Did she say for now and evermore? I haven't looked.
Plus can people please lose the "lampost charging" fantasy.
Lamposts are on streets which either have yellow lines or cars parked beside them. They are not dedicated charging stations, which is what is needed. There will need to be such dedicated bays up and down the country. Every or close to every current pay & display space will have to have access to a charger.
At present I reckon around 0.01% of them are such.
This is a huge infrastructure project that I don't see the government addressing now or perhaps for the next decade.
Absolutely! The average person will not buy an EV is they have nowhere to charge it.
This reminds me of the get rid of boilers nonsense and the replace them with an Air/Ground Sourced Heat Pump. This will simply not happen as the vast majority of people do not have a Plant Room in their house to put all the required equipment in, (and ASHP will not warm a normal house very effectively)
Leaving aside whether some of these things are actually practically possible as opposed to just expensive, I do wonder whether some of these emerging Govt policies are being produced by scientists and others on a “money is no object” basis. With Govt ministers not really understanding the technology and implications before apparently adopting as policy.
I think ministers not really understanding the technology and implications is a given. Very few have any science or engineering knowledge whatsoever. Also true for many civil servants with the exception of those working in their field of speciality.
Therese Coffey, the Work and Pensions secretary, has a PhD in Chemistry.
However it is hardly surprising that most politicians have degrees in history, politics and law etc rather than science and that most scientists prefer to go into industry or the city or medicine or actually do scientific research than become politicians.
However ministers can also hire top rate scientific advisers and academics if they need to
Yes, however this is slightly missing my point (and is actually relevant for the whole Covid/SAGE discussion). That there is a danger that policies get formulated by "expert" groups, that don't just only fail to consider the full picture (particularly from a financial aspect), but don't even make reference to it. Perhaps at a push they might deign to include a few paragraphs citing that "the cost of inaction is unquantifiable (but implicitly large)" such that the Government will be expected to pay for any alternative offered to inaction.
Part of the problem with the whole climate change situation is that there are sound arguments for thinking that ultimately solutions will be found and invested in by "the market" since at some point the market will recognise that they have no choice. But by the time that becomes the market consensus and they go hell for leather, it will likely be too late.
So the upfront action has to come from Governments, but where this action is expensive and/or unpopular (and has negative short or even medium term economic consequences) they can't do it either in democratic societies.
True but that is partly a consequence of democracy, the balance between what might be needed and what will get you re elected
What are the servicing costs involved with electric cars?
The Taycan is about the same as any other Porsche at the dealer at about 1,200 quid. You only have to have it done every two years though.
Forgive my ignorance but do electric cars have gears? If not, and if I were to be convinced that gearless cars will be standard soon, then why is my daughter* bothering to learn to drive in a manual?
(*She narrowly failed a practice theory test this week (85% pass mark required!) and one of the questions she got wrong was about a situation involving a milk float. She doesn't know what a milk float is. Why would she FFS - she's 17 and never seen one in her life.)
All electric? No, mad Porsche aside. My eldest learned in an auto as what is the point now of learning a stick shift? Once you have a motor as transmission you do not want to go back to a gearbox.
Yes, I'm sure this is right, but most learner drivers still learn in a manual because they (rightly or wrongly) think that renting a car when abroad is likely to be a manual and if you pass your test in an automatic you are only licensed (and able!) to drive an automatic.
Everyone should learn in a manual, you're just restricting yourself if you don't.
That's what I say to my 17-year-old every time he whinges about having to learn to use gears. However, the argument holds less and less water as sales of automatics increase, driven partly by EV sales. Last year was, I think, the first year in which more automatics than manuals were sold in the UK. In a couple of decades, manuals will be something of a rarity, and my lad will probably forget how to drive one.
If the story is as it's been reported he has every right to do so - the nursery has been caught bang to rights.
I think what some of Twitter is missing is that to test the admission processes, a number of children (not sure if real or fictional) children were entered who where not the children of prominent SNP politicians.
I’m sure the nursery will argue that they didn’t give a place to Yousaf because he was an arse, rather than because he was Asian.
Anyone else find the annual hand-wringing and 'education is in crisis' day that is 'A' level results day has become a perennial and total bore?
And knocking the lads lasses achievements doesn't do them any good. They can only answer the questions in front of them to the best of their ability. What grade inflation suggests to me is that teachers have become better at teaching.
There is a rather fundamental difference between the "traditional" handwringing over marginal year on year statistical improvements in overall success rates, and the number of top grades essentially doubling in two years. Especially when, in the context of putting this down to "better teaching", the teachers are marking their own work!
Then there is the issue of what happens if and when we return to something more akin to the old system and grades drop again... (or what it means if they don't!)
An estimated 82,000 more people got vaccinated at $68 per head. It prevented 5,000 ICU at $13.5k/day. Right pointing backhand index The $5.6 million lottery is estimated to have saved $66 million.
On topic, I’ll be buying an electric vehicle (or a hybrid at the very least) as soon as my 2007 Fiesta packs up and the law money starts rolling in
Why? What is the main reason? I'm curious to know when you can buy, for example, a small petrol for £12k when a small electric of equivalent size is (I think) £25k plus.
Why not?
- I already have an electric charger at home (it was put in by the builders). - Most of my journeys are under 50 miles and when I do go longer I usually stop for a drink. - Having my car’s tank “full” every morning is also very appealing. - Having less moving parts is appealing from a maintenance perspective.
Obviously finances will ultimately dictate and I don’t like spending a lot of money on cars but I also don’t like paying excessive VED or congestion/emission charges.
Comments
You should be given the benefit of the doubt that you missed that reply, but you do this all the time when you post something that may seem perfectly reasonable and then when it is shown to be wrong respond to the compelling argument by just coming back and repeating the original false item.
Shame because your post was good otherwise.
And how many charging stations?
Netherlands: 66k
Germany: 45k
France: 46k
UK: 42k
Italy: 13k
https://auto.hindustantimes.com/auto/news/these-three-countries-account-for-70-of-ev-charging-stations-in-european-union-41626685855914.html
https://www.edfenergy.com/electric-cars/charging-points#:~:text=There are now more than,350kW ultra-rapid chargers space
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-8965773/Which-hybrid-cars-banned-2035.html
To aid the transition, drivers will still be able to purchase new hybrid cars until 2035, but only those that can 'drive a significant distance without emitting carbon'.
When the government outlined its 'Road to Zero' strategy in 2018, including a ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2040, it said only hybrid cars 'capable of covering 50 miles or more' using electric power alone would remain on sale beyond the deadline.
At the time, 98 per cent of all hybrid cars on sale failed to meet that criteria.
So it looks like we don't know for sure what the future is, but I'd have thought vehicle manufacturers would be looking to phase out hybrids too. Why carry on building ICEs when they are all banned from 2035?
It was, for example, not statistically possible last year to use a three year average for exams as most exams had only been in operation for one or two years, and there had been major problems with marking them. This didn’t stop both the Scottish and English governments trying but it stopped it from being reliable or in any way useful.
The new system has in itself a significant distorting effect because students tend to randomly underperform in exams. Maybe they’re ill, or tired if they fall late in the series, or the air on doesn’t work and they struggle to concentrate. So every year you will have about 20% in an exam only system who will underperform. As confirmed by looking at predicted grades for UCAS as against actual grades.
You also have always had people who underperform by very fine margins. Somebody can get BBB and yet be one mark in each subject off AAA. What will they have been predicted? Well, AAA. Because that’s what they would be able to get. And it may even have been marking error that led to some of those (I once had a candidate who got B instead of A because a marker muddled up Henry VI and Henry VII, but AQA didn’t budge even when the error was photographed and sent to them).
And this year, of course, that has been eliminated. So inevitably the grades are much higher because they’re based on sustained performance not a wet Tuesday morning when you’re feeling sick and have been up half the night.
The other thing to say is, one problem is definitely going to be deciding how far they compare. It will depend on the number and type of assessments the school did, and how they were written. This is compounded by the fact the exam boards have sent out almost no materials to help, including no guidance despite their claims, and there are of course only a couple of past papers to draw on.
This is why it is not at all a smart idea to have everything riding on two exams per subject at the end of a two year course. Certainly not in subjects where marking can be subjective such as History or English. Unfortunately, Cummings wasn’t intelligent enough to understand this. (I haven’t forgotten @Fysics_Teacher disagrees with me given the somewhat different nature of physics.)
Spielman should also probably be fired and banned from further work in the public sector for leaving us in this mess over the strenuous objections of experts.
And certainly Williamson should be fired for not making contingency plans from last September onwards. But whose fault was that? Oh yes, the order came from Downing Street.
Disclaimer - I didn’t have to set any grades for A-level this year as I wasn’t teaching year 13.
Whether they're vaccinated or not is going to have minimal effect on hospitalisations and deaths.
Its the vaccination rates of the 40+ which matter - if those aren't high enough then its going to make sod all difference how many teenagers are vaccinated.
The latest 2022 Tesla S Plaid can run the quarter mile in 9.2 seconds at 152mph. It costs £120k.
The only other cars close to that, are a £450k Ferrari SF90 or a £350k McLaren 765LT, both of which run around 9.4s.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=gfWNRyqhRRM
Thankfully the majority (roughly 60:40) of UK dwellings have off street parking. Even more, those who don’t drive cars are over-represented in the dwellings with no car parking. PWC estimated that a chunky 72% of UK drivers have access to off-street parking at home.
https://pod-point.com/electric-car-news/electric-car-no-driveway
Gets overdone by the London lobby who unduly influence national debate, and like Allegra have good enough public transport.
Extinction Rebellion post their CVs into the banks/IT companies when they leave the protest, to apply for jobs.
I and some colleagues had tremendous fun with one graduate applicant a while back. HR had, very nicely, sent us some of his Facebook material, which they check as part of due diligence.
This also means that they differ substantially from most automatics. It's just the user experience that looks more similar to an automatic.
If you want to buy a track car, fair enough. But it has zero relevance to the everyday driver.
It’s actually better to think of it the other way around. An ICE has a relatively narrow band of torque and power, so it needs a gearbox to keep the engine in its operating window across a wide range of speeds.
The other thing I'd like to see is a review of planning to require new estates to include a significant retail element. When I lived in Bulwell (Nottingham) my block was surrounded by housing in all directions, but we had a huge Morrisons nearby and an easy walk for nearly everyone. Down here in Godalming the shopping area is almost completely separate from the housing area (with virtually no bus service). Neat city planning with people in X, shops in Y and businesses in Z is the antithesis of how most people want to live.
Yes Minister, The Greasy Pole.
Hope you are well Nick
Shortly after I retired I bought an e-bike, which I used for a few years, but even rural roads and that good for them when there are odd industrial estates about, with heavy lorries visiting. And cycling along the A12, even on the cycle lane, is not for the faint-hearted.
Sadly one of the things that has gone wrong as a result of age is my balance and I've not been able to safely ride my bike for a couple of years. Keep getting up my courage to sell it, but then I think ..... maybe in a month or two.
Electric motors are very, very powerful for their size. You can just about pick up an EV motor with your hands... Once you factor in the requirements for regenerative braking, larger motors are *required*
One that Musk was clever enough to see as a selling point - a 4 second car, not a milk float.
‘Now you’re in, I’ve gotcha, no escape possible. If it goes wrong you’ll still be with me.’
Our other car though is a brand new Kia Sorento hybrid (not plug-in) for transporting the kids and all their gear. For such a tank it does return a surprisingly good 40mpg. When going at low speeds in our village it pretty much entirely runs electric and can do 550 miles on a tank of fuel. Given the recent petrol price rises that is now £70. It is on a 4 year lease and I expect that the car that replaces it will be full EV. There was no 7 seat full EV with that kind of range available at the moment. In 4 years time I anticipate the situation will be much improved.
I don't quite understand all the concerns about charging points. The vast majority of the population do not drive enough in a day to need charging when not at home. New build houses should be forced to install car charging points and councils should get on with putting chargers into lamp posts. Most people charge would charge overnight when you don't need super-fast charging. The big difference compared with petrol is that no one has ever filled up their car from a petrol pump at their own home before (unless they own a petrol station). This change in itself means that the requirement for away-from-home refilling is massively reduced with EV compared with ICE. I think most recharging needs will be solved by adding large numbers of charging points in the car parks at motorway services. That is when away-from-home charging is needed, not when popping to the local supermarket.
They are a halo car, and Tesla will sell only a few hundred of them - mostly to the sort of mad Americans in the video, who spend their weekends at a drag strip! The presenter of that channel runs a magazine called Drag Times.
That sort of acceleration is actually quite uncomfortable, it’s like being on a roller-coaster.
When the houses were built, of course, one either walked out of the town, on the rare occasions when one wanted, or needed, to leave, or got the next available horse from the livery stables at the back of the largest local pub.
If you can get a company car going EV is a complete no brainer provided you can find a suitable lease.
However it is hardly surprising that most politicians have degrees in history, politics and law etc rather than science and that most scientists prefer to go into industry or the city or medicine or actually do scientific research than become politicians.
However ministers can also hire top rate scientific advisers and academics if they need to
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-56178802
Seems to me that if you want to concentrate less of the jobs in London, a quick win is to allow people to work from home, outside of London
An electric motor is very different. 100% of the power and torque is available from 0 rpm. It is very efficient in transmitting power to the wheels so no gears are needed - all the power is available all the time.
The other bonus is regeneration. A motor is also a generator. Take your kinetic energy of moving forward and run it in reverse through the motor and you recharge your battery by slowing down *and* don't use consumables like brake pads and discs. (For me) the best EVs have paddles behind the wheel to adjust the amount of regen. Keep it off to let the car roll and burn zero power, and add steps of regen to slow down when required. Once you are at road speed with zero resistance from a gearbox you can coast a long way!
Some manufacturers try and keep things simple. Regen is either a selector (high / low) or can't be adjusted other than "e-Pedal"/one-pedal driving. Personally I hate max regen / 1 pedal as you are always burning power up until you start to brake / regen. Which eradicates coasting and all the efficiency that brings. And I don't get why some manufacturers don't let you adjust this - even Tesla. I can thrash my wife's Ioniq as much as any hot hatch - huge instant power off the motor for point and squirt fun, then dial in regen to toe the nose round corners. Can't do that in a Tesla...
https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2021/aug/10/messis-exit-shows-players-are-abottom-of-footballs-power-structure-barcelona
If he loved Barcelona so much, why not play for them for free?...
[T]he notion the world’s most gifted footballer should simply offer his services pro bono betrays a telling lack of perspective.
Whilst the situation may have been beyond recovery at this point, the real issue is that Messi has drained Barca over the last few years. It reminds me a little bit of Ayrton Senna and McLaren. Senna thought that to be considered the best he had to be paid the most by a long way. And whilst McLaren were spending silly money on Senna's salary, Williams were spending money on Adrian Newey.
The good news for Messi is that his greed probably won't lead indirectly to his death.
Range is mostly a function of battery size.
They are pretty useless and incompetent, but let’s blame them for what they do, not for what they don’t.
https://twitter.com/htscotpol/status/1425012936809013253?s=21
If an issue is a deal-breaker for more than a quarter of the cars on the road then I'd call that pretty serious and not a red-herring.
I’ll be voting LDs I think as Labour don’t need any more councillors on NCC.
Going 65 rather than 75 on a long journey makes a massive difference to range, as wind resistance is proportional to the square of the speed. That also holds for ICE cars, but we don’t notice as we can fill them up in five minutes.
This is massively exaggerated with roof racks, trailers, caravans etc. A Tesla towing a caravan can go from full to empty in 100 miles.
@philipjcowley
·
Aug 18, 2016
Middle aged people who did A levels decades ago: today is not about you.
What grade inflation suggests to me is that teachers have become better at teaching.
I think provision at supermarkets will be vital to take up. Even on road trips not everywhere is close to a service station. Much better if you could reliably assume that every Sainsburys would allow you to pick up your suntan lotion/umbrella and charge your car at the same time.
Mind you, a relative was towing 2 tons behind a Model X. The range didn't go down that much....
The worry is I don’t see how things will get better rathe than worse over the next 18 months. We still have no clue what assessments will be like next year, as the proposed system is totally unworkable.
If exams and assessments do not properly distinguish between candidates academically, then admission to our top universities and hence top jobs becomes a lottery
https://twitter.com/mrjakehumphrey/status/766177100403470336
Jake Humphrey 💙
@mrjakehumphrey
A-level students - remember results don't/won't define you.
In 1999 I got E, N, U for mine. Things haven't turned out too bad...
* that really was a crisis year as I was really worried I would flunk the applied maths paper.
In any event, fast charging is taking over quite rapidly. My guess is that overnight trickle charging will become a nice-to-have. I know a couple of people who own EVs, in flats with no off street parking.
https://twitter.com/JeremyClarkson/status/1424988174502277135?s=20
Part of the problem with the whole climate change situation is that there are sound arguments for thinking that ultimately solutions will be found and invested in by "the market" since at some point the market will recognise that they have no choice. But by the time that becomes the market consensus and they go hell for leather, it will likely be too late.
So the upfront action has to come from Governments, but where this action is expensive and/or unpopular (and has negative short or even medium term economic consequences) they can't do it either in democratic societies.
No, just no.
As for Aleggra Stratton, she should have followed the maxim that it’s better to stay quiet and be thought a fool, than speak and remove all doubt.
Although the Nimbyism is strong.
The Tory candidate lives a whole 8 miles away? In Byker? God forbid.
No more than 10% should ever get an A* or A grade level and only 3% max should get an A* grade if exams are to do their job
The irony is that last summer there was a proposal to do just that. The exam boards and Ofqual had agreed a system whereby grades would be taken in monthly for each student. Then, if exams were cancelled, an average of those grades could be used. Any possible issues would be flagged up well in advance and a proper inspection ordered to see what was happening. Now I’m strongly critical of both groups. But as a reasonable substitute in impossible times, it was a decent idea.
What happened? The DfE ordered it scrapped, on the grounds there was no possibility exams would be cancelled again, so it was a waste of time and money. And that was the DfE. Not ministers.
It’s thoroughly disheartening to realise just how useless the people running the country can be.
I think everyone involved has done their best, and it’s not been easy for either the children with multiple extra exams or for the teachers with the extra workload generated. Sure there will be a few teachers who have pushed the envelope and the Daily Wail will scream about them for weeks. But then, principal examiners at exam boards have been known to quietly adjust the marking for their own students. I’ve blown the whistle on it and I wasn’t popular.
The key now is to accept we are where we are, that this is the best that could have been achieved after earlier serious mistakes and move on from there.
That does not mean heads should not roll, however, as several people have shown they have neither the intelligence or the judgement to manage the roles they have.
So to OldKingCole’s grandson and Big-G’s granddaughter, I hope congratulations on getting on their uni courses are in order and they have a much more productive time at uni than they’ve had in FE.
You'll be up for a severe telling off by Ms Priti Patel!
As Polybius notes, that one man made a massive difference.
The safety requirements for it are quite interesting. Also the stories of what happens when the rules are broken...
Then there is the issue of what happens if and when we return to something more akin to the old system and grades drop again... (or what it means if they don't!)
https://twitter.com/page_eco/status/1422537011915747335
An estimated 82,000 more people got vaccinated at $68 per head. It prevented 5,000 ICU at $13.5k/day.
Right pointing backhand index The $5.6 million lottery is estimated to have saved $66 million.
- I already have an electric charger at home (it was put in by the builders).
- Most of my journeys are under 50 miles and when I do go longer I usually stop for a drink.
- Having my car’s tank “full” every morning is also very appealing.
- Having less moving parts is appealing from a maintenance perspective.
Obviously finances will ultimately dictate and I don’t like spending a lot of money on cars but I also don’t like paying excessive VED or congestion/emission charges.